"So you've come back," she said. "You might go in and tell me how he
is."

"Haven't you seen him?"

"Of course I've seen him. But I'm afraid, Jerrold. It was awful, awful,
the haemorrhage. You can't think how awful. I daren't go in and see it
again. I shouldn't be a bit of good if I did. I should only faint, or be
ill or something. I simply can not bear it."

"You mustn't go in," he said.

"Who's with him?"

"Eliot and Anne."

"Anne?"

"Yes."

"Jerrold, to think that Anne should be with him and me not."

"Well, she'll be all right. She can stand things."

"It's all very well for Anne. He isn't _her_ husband."

"You'd better go away, Mother."

"Not before you tell me how he is. Go in, Jerrold."

He knocked and went in.

His father was sitting up in his white, slender bed, raised on Eliot's
arm. He saw his face, strained and smoothed with exhaustion, sallow
white against the pillows, the back-drawn-mouth, the sharp, peaked nose,
the iron grey hair, pointed with sweat, sticking to the forehead. A face
of piteous, tired patience, waiting. He saw Eliot's face, close, close
beside it by the edge of the pillow, grave and sombre and intent.

Anne was crossing the room from the bed to the washstand. Her face was
very white but she had an air of great competence and composure. She
carried a white basin brimming with a reddish froth. He saw little red
specks splashed on the sleeve of her white linen gown. He shuddered.

Eliot made a sign to him and he went back to the door where his mother
waited.

"Is he better?" she whispered. "Can I come in?"

Jerrold shook his head. "Better not--yet."

"You'll send for me if--if--"

"Yes."

He heard her trailing away along the gallery. He went into the room. He
stood at the foot of the bed and stared, stared at his father lying
there in Eliot's arms. He would have liked to have been in Eliot's
place, close to him, close, holding him. As it was he could do nothing
but stand and look at him with that helpless, agonized stare. He _had_
to look at him, to look and look, punishing himself with sight for not
having seen.

His eyes felt hot and brittle; they kept on filling with tears, burned
themselves dry and filled again. His hand clutched the edge of the
footrail as if only so he could keep his stand there.

A stream of warm air came through the open windows. Everything in the
room stood still in it, unnaturally still, waiting. He was aware of the
pattern of the window curtains. Blue parrots perched on brown branches
among red flowers on a white ground; it all hung very straight and
still, waiting.

Anne looked at him and spoke. She was standing beside the bed now,
holding the clean basin and a towel, ready.

"Jerrold, you might go and get some more ice. It's in the bucket in the
bath-room. Break it up into little pieces, like that. You split it with
a needle."

He went to the bath-room, moving like a sleepwalker, wrapped in his
dream-like horror. He found the ice, he broke it into little pieces,
like that. He was very careful and conscientious about the size, and
grateful to Anne for giving him something to do. Then he went back again
and took up his station at the foot of the bed and waited. His father
still lay back on his pillow, propped by Eliot's arm. His hands were
folded on his chest above the bedclothes.

Anne still stood by the bed holding her basin and her towel ready. From
time to time they gave him little pieces of ice to suck.

Once he opened his eyes, looked round the room and spoke. "Is your
mother there?"

"Do you want her?" Eliot said.

"No. It'll only upset her. Don't let her come in."

He closed his eyes and opened them again.

"Is that Anne?"

"Yes. Who did you think it was?"

"I don't know...I'm sorry, Anne."

"Darling--" the word broke from a tender inarticulate sound she made.

Then: "Jerrold--," he said.

Jerrold came closer. His father's right arm unfolded itself and
stretched out towards him along the bed.

Anne whispered, "Take his hand." Jerrold took it. He could feel it
tremble as he touched it.

"It's all right, Jerry," he said. "It's all right." He gave a little
choking cough. His eyes darkened with a sudden anxiety, a fear. His hand
slackened. His head sank forward. Anne came between them. Jerrold felt
the slight thrust of her body pushing him aside. He saw her arms
stretched out, and the white gleam of the basin, then, the haemorrhage,
jet after jet. Then his father's face tilted up on Eliot's arm, very
white, and Anne stooping over him tenderly, and her hand with the towel,
wiping the red foam from his lips.

Then eyes glazed between half-shut lids, mouth open, and the noise of
death.

Eliot's arm laid down its burden. He got up and put his hand on
Jerrold's shoulder and led him out of the room. "Go out into the air,"
he said. "I'll tell Mother."

Jerrold staggered downstairs, and through the hall and out into the
blinding sunshine.

Far down the avenue he could hear the whirring of the car coming back
from Cheltenham; the lines of the beech trees opened fan-wise to let it
through. He saw Colin sitting up beside Scarrott.

Above his head a lattice ground and clattered. Somebody was going
through the front rooms, shutting the windows and pulling down the
blinds.

Jerrold turned back into the house to meet Colin there.

Upstairs his father's door opened and shut softly and Anne came out. She
moved along the gallery to her room. Between the dark rails he could see
her white skirt, and her arm, hanging, and the little specks of red
splashed on the white sleeve.


iii

Jerrold was afraid of Anne, and he saw no end to his fear. He had been
dashed against the suffering he was trying to put away from him and the
shock of it had killed in one hour his young adolescent passion. She
would be for ever associated with that suffering. He would never see
Anne without thinking of his father's death. He would never think of his
father's death without seeing Anne. He would see her for ever through an
atmosphere of pain and horror, moving as she had moved in his father's
room. He couldn't see her any other way. This intolerable memory of her
effaced all other memories, memories of the child Anne with the rabbit,
of the young, happy Anne who walked and rode and played with him, of the
strange, mysterious Anne he had found yesterday in her room at dawn.
That Anne belonged to a time he had done with. There was nothing left
for him but the Anne who had come to tell him his father was dying, who
had brought him to his father's death-bed, who had bound herself up
inseparably with his death, who only moved from the scene of it to
appear dressed in black and carrying the flowers for his funeral.

She was wrapped round and round with death and death, nothing but death,
and with Jerrold's suffering. When he saw her he suffered again. And as
his way had always been to avoid suffering, he avoided Anne. His eyes
turned from her if he saw her coming. He spoke to her without looking at
her. He tried not to think of her. When he had gone he would try not to
remember.

His one idea was to go, to get away from the place his father had died
in and from the people who had seen him die. He wanted new unknown
faces, new unknown voices that would not remind him------

Ten days after his father's death the letter came from John Severn. He
wrote:

"... I'm delighted about Sir Charles Durham. You are a lucky devil. Any
chap Sir Charles takes a fancy to is bound to get on. He can't help
himself. You're not afraid of hard work, and I can tell you we give our
Assistant Commissioners all they want and a lot more.

"It'll be nice if you bring Anne out with you. If you're stationed
anywhere near us we ought to give her the jolliest time in her life
between us."

"But Jerrold," said Adeline when she had read this letter. "You're not
going out _now_. You must wire and tell him so."

"Why not now?"

"Because, my dear boy, you've got the estate and you must stay and look
after it."

"Barker'll look after it. That's what he's there for."

"Nonsense, Jerrold. There's no need for you to go out to India."

"There _is_ need. I've got to go."

"You haven't. There's every need for you to stop where you are. Eliot
will be going abroad if Sir Martin Crozier takes him on. And if Colin
goes into the diplomatic service Goodness knows where he'll be sent to."

"Colin won't be sent anywhere for another four years."

"No. But he'll be at Cheltenham or Cambridge half the time. I must have
one son at home."

"Sorry, Mother. But I can't stand it here. I've got to go, and I'm
going."

To all her arguments and entreaties he had one answer: He had got to go
and he was going.

Adeline left him and went to look for Eliot whom she found in his room
packing to go back to London. She came sobbing to Eliot.

"It's too dreadfully hard. As if it weren't bad enough to lose my
darling husband I must lose all my sons. Not one of you will stay with
me. And there's Anne going off with Jerrold. _She_ may have him with her
and I mayn't. She's taken everything from me. You'd have said if a
wife's place was anywhere it was with her dying husband. But no. _She_
was allowed to be with him and _I_ was turned out of his room."

"My dear Mother, you know you weren't."

"I _was_. You turned me out yourself, Eliot, and had Anne in."

"Only because you couldn't stand it and she could."

"I daresay. She hadn't the same feelings."

"She had her own feelings, anyhow, only she controlled them. She stood
it because she never thought of her feelings. She only thought of what
she could do to help. She was magnificent."

"Of course you think so, because you're in love with her. She must take
you, too. As if Jerrold wasn't enough."

"She hasn't taken me. She probably won't if I ask her. You shouldn't say
those things, Mother. You don't know what you're talking about."

"I know I'm the most unhappy woman in the world. How am I going to live?
I can't stand it if Jerry goes."

"He's got to go, Mother."

"He hasn't. Jerrold's place is here. He's got a duty and a
responsibility. Your dear father didn't leave him the estate for him to
let it go to wrack and ruin. It's most cruel and wrong of him."

"He can't do anything else. Don't you see why he wants to go? He can't
stand the place without Father."

"I've got to stand it. So he may."

"Well, he won't, that's all. He simply funks it."

"He always was an arrant coward where trouble was concerned. He doesn't
think of other people and how bad it is for them. He leaves me when I
want him most."

"It's hard on you, Mother; but you can't stop him. And I don't think you
ought to try."

"Oh, everybody tells me what _I_ ought to do. My children can do as they
like. So can Anne. She and Jerrold can go off to India and amuse
themselves as if nothing had happened and it's all right."

But Anne didn't go off to India.

When she spoke to Jerrold about going with him his hard, unhappy face
showed her that he didn't want her.

"You'd rather I didn't go," she said gently.

"It isn't that, Anne. It isn't that I don't want you. It's--it's simply
that I want to get away from here, to get away from everything that
reminds me--I shall go off my head if I've got to remember every minute,
every time I see somebody who--I want to make a clean break and grow a
new memory."

"I understand. You needn't tell me."

"Mother doesn't. I wish you'd make her see it."

"I'll try. But it's all right, Jerrold. I won't go."

"Of course you'll go. Only you won't think me a brute if I don't take
you out with me?"

"I'm not going out with you. In fact, I don't think I'm going at all. I
only wanted to because of going out together and because of the chance
of seeing you when you got leave. I only thought of the heavenly times
we might have had."

"Don't--don't, Anne."

"No, I won't. After all, I shouldn't care a rap about Ambala if you
weren't there. And you may be stationed miles away. I'd rather go back
to Ilford and do farming. Ever so much rather. India would really have
wasted a lot of time."

"Oh, Anne, I've spoilt all your pleasure."

"No, you haven't. There isn't any pleasure to spoil--now."

"What a brute--what a cad you must think me."

"I don't, Jerry. It's not your fault. Things have just happened. And you
see, I understand. I felt the same about Auntie Adeline after Mother
died. I didn't want to see her because she reminded me--and yet, really,
I loved her all the time."

"You won't go back on me for it?"

"I wouldn't go back on you whatever you did. And you mustn't keep on
thinking I _want_ to go to India. I don't care a rap about India itself.
I hate Anglo-Indians and I simply loathe hot places. And Daddy doesn't
want me out there, really. I shall be much happier on my farm. And it'll
save a lot of expense, too. Just think what my outfit and passage would
have cost."

"You wouldn't have cared what it cost if--"

"There isn't any if. I'm not lying, really." Not lying. Not lying. She
would have given up more than India to save Jerrold that pang of memory.
Only, when it was all over and he had sailed without her, she realized
in one wounding flash that what she had given up was Jerrold himself.



V


ELIOT AND ANNE

i

Anne did not go back to her Ilford farm at once. Adeline had made that
impossible.

At the prospect of Anne's going her resentment died down as suddenly as
it had risen. She forgot that Anne had taken her sons' affection and her
place beside her husband's deathbed. And though she couldn't help
feeling rather glad that Jerrold had gone to India without Anne, she was
sorry for her. She loved her and she meant to keep her. She said she
simply could not bear it if Anne left her, and _was_ it the time to
choose when she wanted her as she had never wanted her before? She had
nobody to turn to, as Anne knew. Corbetts and Hawtreys and Markhams and
people were all very well; but they were outsiders.

"It's the inside people that I want now, Anne. You're deep inside,
dear."

Yes, of course she had relations. But relations were no use. They were
all wrapped up in their own tiresome affairs, and there wasn't one of
them she cared for as she cared for Anne.

"I couldn't care more if you were my own daughter. Darling Robert felt
about you just the same. You _can't_ leave me."

And Anne didn't. She never could resist unhappiness. She thought: "I was
glad enough to stop with her through all the happy times. I'd be a
perfect beast to go and leave her now when she's miserable and hasn't
got anybody."

It would have been better for Anne if she could have gone. Robert
Fielding's death and Jerrold's absence were two griefs that inflamed
each other; they came together to make one immense, intolerable wound.
And here at Wyck, she couldn't move without coming upon something that
touched it and stung it to fresh pain. But Anne was not like Jerrold, to
turn from what she loved because it hurt her. For as long as she could
remember all her happiness had come to her at Wyck. If unhappiness came
now, she had got, as Eliot said, "to take it."

And so she stayed on through the autumn, then over Christmas to the New
Year; this time because of Colin who was suffering from depression.
Colin had never got over his father's death and Jerrold's going; and the
last thing Jerrold had said to her before he went was; "You'll look
after Col-Col, won't you? Don't let him go grousing about by himself."

Jerrold had always expected her to look after Colin. At seventeen there
was still something piteous and breakable about him, something that
clung to you for help. Eliot said that if Colin didn't look out he'd be
a regular neurotic. But he owned that Anne was good for him.

"I don't know what you do to him, but he's better when you're there."

Eliot was the one who appeared to have recovered first. He met the shock
of his father's death with a defiant energy and will.

He was working now at bacteriology under Sir Martin Crozier. Covered
with a white linen coat, in a white-washed room of inconceivable
cleanness, surrounded by test-tubes and mixing jars, Eliot spent the
best part of the day handling the germs of the deadliest diseases;
making cultures, examining them under the microscope; preparing
vaccines. He went home to the brown velvety, leathery study in his
Welbeck Street flat to write out his notes, or read some monograph on
inoculation; or he dined with a colleague and talked to him about
bacteria.

At this period of his youth Eliot had more than ever the appearance of
inhuman preoccupation. His dark, serious face detached itself with a
sort of sullen apathy from the social scene. He seemed to have no keen
interests beyond his slides and mixing jars and test-tubes. Women, for
whom his indifference had a perverse fascination, said of him: "Dr.
Fielding isn't interested in people, only in their diseases. And not
really in diseases, only in their germs."

They never suspected that Eliot was passionate, and that a fierce pity
had driven him into his profession. The thought of preventable disease
filled him with fury; he had no tolerance for the society that tolerated
it. He suffered because he had a clearer vision and a profounder sense
of suffering than most persons. Up to the time of his father's death all
Eliot's suffering had been other people's. He couldn't rest till he had
done something to remove the cause of it.

Add to this an insatiable curiosity as to causes, and you have the main
bent of Eliot's mind.

And it seemed to him that there was nobody but Anne who saw that hidden
side of him. _She_ knew that he was sorry for people, and that being
sorry for them had made him what he was, like Jerrold and yet unlike
him. Eliot was attracted to suffering by the same sensitiveness that
made Jerrold avoid everything once associated with it.

And so the very thing that Jerrold couldn't bear to remember was what
drew Eliot closer to Anne. He saw her as Jerrold had seen her, moving,
composed and competent, in his father's room; he saw her stooping over
him to help him, he saw the specks of blood on her white sleeve; and he
thought of her with the more tenderness. From that instant he really
loved her. He wanted Anne as he had never conceived himself wanting any
woman. He could hardly remember his first adolescent feeling for her,
that confused mixture of ignorant desire and fear, so different was it
from the intense, clear passion that possessed him now. At night when
his work was done, he lay in bed, not sleeping, thinking of Anne with
desire that knew itself too well to be afraid. Anne was the one thing
necessary to him beside his work, necessary as a living part of himself.
She could only not come before his work because Eliot's work came before
himself and his own happiness. When he went down every other week-end to
Wyck-on-the-Hill he knew that it was to see Anne.

His mother knew it too.

"I wish Eliot would marry," she said.

"Why?" said Anne.

"Because then he wouldn't be so keen on going off to look for germs in
disgusting climates."

Anne wondered whether Adeline knew Eliot. For Eliot talked to her about
his work as he walked with her at a fine swinging pace over the open
country, taking all his exercise now while he could get it. That was
another thing he liked about Anne Severn, her splendid physical fitness;
she could go stride for stride with him, and mile for mile, and never
tire. Her mind, too, was robust and active, and full of curiosity; it
listened by the hour and never tired. It could move, undismayed, among
horrors. She could see, as he saw, the "beauty" of the long trains of
research by which Sir Martin Crozier had tracked down the bacillus of
amoebic dysentery and established the difference between typhoid and
Malta fever.

Once started on his subject, the grave, sullen Eliot talked excitedly.

"You do see, Anne, how thrilling it is, don't you? For me there's
nothing but bacteriology. I always meant to go in for it, and Sir
Martin's magnificent. Absolutely top-hole. You see, all these disgusting
diseases can be prevented. It's inconceivable that they should be
tolerated in a civilized country. People can't care a rap or they
couldn't sleep in their beds. They ought to get up and make a public row
about it, to insist on compulsory inoculation for everybody whether they
like it or not. It really isn't enough to cure people of diseases when
they've got them. We ought to see that they never get them, that there
aren't any to get... What we don't know yet is the complete behaviour of
all these bacteria among themselves. A bad bacillus may be doing good
work by holding down a worse one. It's conceivable that if we succeeded
in exterminating all known diseases we might release an unknown one,
supremely horrible, that would exterminate the race."

"Oh Eliot, how awful. How can _you_ sleep in your bed?"

"You needn't worry. It's only a nightmare idea of mine."

And so on and so on, for he was still so young that he wanted Anne to be
excited by the things that excited him. And Anne told him all about her
Ilford farm and what she meant to do on it. Eliot didn't behave like
Aunt Adeline, he listened beautifully, like Uncle Robert and Jerrold, as
if it was really most important that you should have a farm and work on
it.

"What I want is to sell it and get one here. I don't want to be anywhere
else. I can't tell you how frightfully home-sick I am when I'm away. I
keep on seeing those gables with the little stone balls, and the
peacocks, and the fields down to the Manor Farm. And the hills, Eliot.
When I'm away I'm always dreaming that I'm trying to get back to them
and something stops me. Or I see them and they turn into something else.
I shan't be happy till I can come back for good."

"You don't want to go to India?" Eliot's heart began to beat as he asked
his question.

"I want to work. To work hard. To work till I'm so dead tired that I
roll off to sleep the minute I get into bed. So tired that I can't
dream."

"That isn't right. You're too young to feel like that, Anne."

"I do feel like it. You feel like it yourself--My farm is to me what
your old bacteria are to you."

"Oh, if I thought it was the farm--"

"Why, what else did you think it was?"

Eliot couldn't bring himself to tell her. He took refuge in apparent
irrelevance.

"You know Father left me the Manor Farm house, don't you?"

"No, I didn't. I suppose he thought you'd want to come back, like me."

"Well, I'm glad I've got it. Mother's got the Dower House in Wyck. But
she'll stay on here till--"

"Till Jerrold comes back," said Anne bravely.

"I don't suppose Jerry'll turn her out even then. Unless--"

But neither he nor Anne had the courage to say "unless he marries."

Not Anne, because she couldn't trust herself with the theme of Jerrold's
marrying. Not Eliot, because he had Jerrold's word for it that if he
married anybody, ever, it would not be Anne.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was this assurance that made it possible for him to say what he had
been thinking of saying all the time that he talked to Anne about his
bacteriology. Bacteriology was a screen behind which Eliot, uncertain of
Anne's feelings, sheltered himself against irrevocable disaster. He
meant to ask Anne to marry him, but he kept putting it off because, so
long as he didn't know for certain that she wouldn't have him, he was at
liberty to think she would. He would not be taking her from Jerrold.
Jerrold, inconceivable ass, didn't want her. Eliot had made sure of that
months ago, the night before Jerrold sailed. He had simply put it to
him: what did he mean to do about Anne Severn? And Jerrold had made it
very plain that his chief object in going to India was to get away from
Anne Severn and Everything. Eliot knew Jerrold too well to suspect his
sincerity, so he considered that the way was now honorably open to him.

His only uncertainty was Anne herself. He had meant to give her a year
to forget Jerrold in, if she was ever going to forget him; though in
moments of deeper insight he realized that Anne was not likely to
forget, nor to marry anybody else as long as she remembered.

Yet, Eliot reasoned, women did marry, even remembering. They married and
were happy. You saw it every day. He was content to take Anne on her own
terms, at any cost, at any risk. He had never been afraid of risks, and
once he had faced the chance of her refusal all other dangers were
insignificant.

A year was a long time, and Eliot had to consider the probability of his
going out to Central Africa with Sir Martin Crozier to investigate
sleeping sickness. He wanted the thing settled one way or another before
he went.

He put it off again till the next week-end. And in the meanwhile Sir
Martin Crozier had seen him. He was starting in the spring and Eliot was
to go with him.

It was on Sunday evening that he spoke to Anne, sitting with her under
the beeches at the top of the field where she and Jerrold had sat
together. Eliot had chosen his place badly.

"I wouldn't bother you so soon if I wasn't going away, but I simply
must--must know--"

"Must know what?"

"Whether you care for me at all. Not much, of course, but just enough
not to hate marrying me."

Anne turned her face full on him and looked at him with her innocent,
candid eyes. And all she said was, "You _do_ know about Jerrold, don't
you?"

"Oh God, yes. I know all about him."

"He's why I can't."

"I tell you, I know all about Jerrold. He isn't a good enough reason."

"Good enough for me."

"Not unless--" But he couldn't say it.

"Not unless he cares for me. That's why you're asking me, then, because
you know he doesn't."

"Well, it wouldn't be much good if I knew he did."

"Eliot, it's awful of me to talk about it, as if he'd said he did. He
never said a word. He never will."

"I'm afraid he won't, Anne."

"Don't imagine I ever thought he would. He never did anything to make me
think it for a minute, really."

"Are you quite sure he didn't?"

"Quite sure. I made it all up out of my head. My silly head. I don't
care what you think of me so long as you don't think it was Jerry's
fault. I should go on caring for him whatever he did or didn't do."

"I know you would. But it's possible--"

"To care for two people and marry one of them, no matter which? It isn't
possible for me. If I can't have the person I want I won't have
anybody."

"It isn't wise, Anne. I tell you I could make you care for me. I know
all about you. I know how you think and how you feel. I understand you
better than Jerrold does. You'd be happy with me and you'd be safe."

"It's no use. I'd rather be unhappy and in danger if it was with
Jerrold."

"You'll be unhappy and in danger without him."

"I don't care. Besides, I shan't be. I shall work. You'll work, too.
It'll be so exciting that you'll soon forget all about me."

"You know I shan't. And I'll never give you up, unless Jerrold gets
you."

"Eliot--I only told you about Jerrold, because I thought you ought to
know. So that you mightn't think it was anything in you."

"It isn't something in me, then? Tell me--if it hadn't been for Jerry,
do you think you might have cared for me?"

"Yes. I do. I quite easily might. And I think it would be a jolly good
thing if I could, now. Only I can't. I can't."

"Poor little Anne."

"Does it comfort you to think I'd have cared if it hadn't been for
Jerry?"

"It does, very much."

"Eliot--you're the only person I can talk to about him. Do you mind
telling me whether he said that to you, or whether you just guessed it."

"What?"

"Why, that he wouldn't--ever--"

"I asked him, Anne, because I had to know. And he told me."

"I thought he told you."

"Yes, he told me. But I'm a cad for letting you think he didn't care for
you. I believe he did, or that he would have cared--awfully--if my
father hadn't died just then. Your being in the room that day upset him.
If it hadn't been for that--"

"Yes, but there _was_ that. It was like he was when Binky died and he
couldn't stand Yearp. Don't you remember how he wouldn't let me go with
him to see Yearp because he said he didn't want me mixed up with it.
Well--I've been mixed up, that's all."

"Still, Anne, I'm certain he'd have cared--if that's any comfort to you.
You didn't make it up out of your dear little head. We all thought it.
Father thought it. I believe he wanted it. If he'd only known!"

She thought: If he'd only known how he had hurt her, he who had never
hurt anybody in all his beautiful life.

"Dear Uncle Robert. There's no good talking about it. I knew, the minute
Jerry said he didn't want me to go to India with him."

"Is that why you didn't go?"

"Yes."

"That was a mistake, Anne. You should have gone."

"How could I, after that? And if I had, he'd only have kept away."

"You should have let him go first and then gone after him. You should
have turned up suddenly, in wonderful clothes, looking cheerful and
beautiful. So that you wiped out the memory he funked. As it is you've
left him nothing else to think of."

"I daresay that's what I should have done. But it's too late. I can't do
it now."

"I'm not so sure."

"What, go _after_ Jerrold? Hunt him down? Dress up and scheme to make
him marry me?"

"Yes. Yes. Yes."

"Eliot, you know I couldn't."

"You said once you'd commit a crime for anybody you cared about."

"A crime, yes. But not that. I'd rather die."

"You're too fastidious. It's only the unscrupulous people who get what
they want in this world. They know what they want and go for it. They
stamp on everything and everybody that gets in their way."

"Oh, Eliot dear, I know what I want, and I'd go for it. If only Jerrold
knew, too."

"He would know if you showed him."

"And that's just what I can't do."

"Well, don't say I didn't give you the best possible advice, against my
own interests, too."

"It was sweet of you. But you see how impossible it is."

"I see how adorable you are. You always were."


iv

For the first time in her life Adeline was furious.

She had asked Eliot whether he was or was not going to marry Anne
Severn, and was told that he had asked her to marry him that afternoon
and that she wouldn't have him.

"Wouldn't have you? What's she thinking of?"

"You'd better ask her," said Eliot, never dreaming that she would.

But that was what Adeline did. She came that night to Anne's room just
as Anne was getting into bed. Unappeased by her defenseless attitude,
she attacked with violence.

"What's all this about Eliot asking you to marry him?"

Anne uncurled herself and sat up on the edge of her bed.

"Did he tell you?"

"Yes. Of course he told me. He says you refused him. Did you?"

"I'm afraid I did."

"Then Anne, you're a perfect little fool."

"But Auntie, I don't love him."

"Nonsense; you love him as much as most people love the men they marry.
He's quite sensible. He doesn't want you to go mad about him."

"He wants more than I can give him."

"Well, all I can say is if you can't give him what he wants you'd no
business to go about with him as you've been doing."

"I've been going about with him all my life and I never dreamed he'd
want to marry me."

"What did you suppose he'd want?"

"Why, nothing but just to go about. As we always did."

"You idiot."

"I don't see why you should be so cross about it."

Adeline sat down in the armchair at the head of the bed, prepared to
"have it out" with Anne.

"I suppose you think my son's happiness is nothing to me? Didn't it
occur to you that if you refuse him he'll stick for years in that awful
place he's going to? Whereas if he had a wife in England there'd be a
chance of his coming home now and then. Perhaps he'd never go out
again."

"I'm sorry, Auntie. I can't marry Eliot even to keep him in England.
Even to please you."

"Even to save his life, you mean. You don't care if he dies of some
hideous tropical disease."

"I care awfully. But I can't marry him. He knows why."

"It's more than I do. If you're thinking of Jerrold, you needn't. I
thought you'd done with that schoolgirlish nonsense."

"I'm not 'thinking' of him. I'm not 'thinking' of anybody and I wish
you'd leave me alone."

"My dear child, how can I leave you alone when I see you making the
mistake of your life? Eliot is absolutely the right person for you, if
you'd only the sense to see it. He's got more character than anybody I
know. Much more than dear Jerry. He'll be ten times more interesting to
live with."

"I thought Jerrold was your favourite."

"No, Eliot, my dear. Always Eliot. He was my first baby."

"Well, I'm awfully sorry you mind so much. And I'd marry Eliot if I
could. I simply hate him to be unhappy. But he won't be. He'll live to
be frightfully glad I didn't...What, aren't you going to kiss me
good-night?"

Adeline had risen and turned away with the great dignity of her
righteous anger.

"I don't feel like it," she said. "I think you've been thoroughly
selfish and unkind. I hate girls who go on like that--making a man mad
about you by pretending to be his comrade, and then throwing him over.
I've had more men in love with me, Anne, than you've seen in your life,
but I never did _that_."

"Oh Auntie, what about Father? And you were engaged to him."

"Well, anyhow," said Adeline, softened by the recollection, "I _was_
engaged."

She smiled her enchanting smile; and Anne, observing the breakdown of
dignity, got up off the bed and kissed her.

"I don't suppose," she said, "that Father was the only one."

"He wasn't. But then, with _me_, my dear, it was their own risk. They
knew where they were."


v

In March, nineteen eleven, Eliot went out to Central Africa. He stayed
there two years, investigating malaria and sleeping sickness. Then he
went on to the Straits Settlements and finally took a partnership in a
practice at Penang.

Anne left Wyck at Easter and returned in August because of Colin. Then
she went back to her Ilford farm.

The two years passed, and in the spring of the third year, nineteen
fourteen, she came again.



VI


QUEENIE

i

Something awful had happened. Adeline had told Anne about it.

It seemed that Colin in his second year at Cambridge, when he should
have given his whole mind to reading for the Diplomatic Service, had had
the imprudence to get engaged. And to a girl that Adeline had never
heard of, about whom nothing was known but that she was remarkably
handsome and that her family (Courthopes of Leicestershire) were, in
Adeline's brief phrase, "all right."

From the terrace they could see, coming up the lawn from the goldfish
pond, Colin and his girl.

Queenie Courthope. She came slowly, her short Russian skirt swinging out
from her ankles. The brilliance of her face showed clear at a distance,
vermilion on white, flaming; hard, crystal eyes, sweeping and flashing;
bobbed hair, brown-red, shining in the sun. Then a dominant, squarish
jaw, and a mouth exquisitely formed, but thin, a vermilion thread drawn
between her staring, insolent nostrils and the rise of her round chin.

This face in its approach expressed a profound, arrogant indifference to
Adeline and Anne. Only as it turned towards Colin its grey-black eyes
lowered and were soft dark under the black feathers of their brows.

Colin looked back at it with a shy, adoring tenderness.

Queenie could be even more superbly uninterested than Adeline. In
Adeline's self-absorption there was a passive innocence, a candor that
disarmed you, but Queenie's was insolent and hostile; it took possession
of the scene and challenged every comer.

"Hallo, Anne!" Colin shouted. "How did you get here?"

"Motored down."

"I say, have you got a car?"

"Only just."

"Drove yourself?"

"Rather."

Queenie scowled as if there were something disagreeable to her in the
idea that Anne should have a car of her own and drive it. She endured
the introduction in silence and addressed herself with an air of
exclusiveness to Colin.

"What are we going to do?"

"Anything you like," he said.

"I'll play you singles, then."

"Anne might like to play," said Colin. But he still looked at Queenie,
as she flamed in her beauty.

"Oh, three's a rotten game. You can't play the two of us unless Miss
Severn handicaps me."

"She won't do that. Anne could take us both on and play a decent game."

Queenie picked up her racquet and stood between them, beating her skirts
with little strokes of irritated impatience. Her eyes were fixed on
Colin, trying, you could see, to dominate him.

"We'd better take it in turns," he said.

"Thanks, Col-Col. I'd rather not play. I've driven ninety-seven miles."

"Really rather?"

Queenie backed towards the court.

"Oh, come on, Colin, if you're coming."

He went.

"What do you think of Queenie?" Adeline said.

"She's very handsome."

"Yes, Anne. But it isn't a nice face. Now, is it?"

Anne couldn't say it was a nice face.

"It's awful to think of Colin being married to it. He's only twenty-one
now, and she's seven years older. If it had been anybody but Colin. If
it had been Eliot or Jerrold I shouldn't have minded so much. They can
look after themselves. He'll never stand up against that horrible girl."

"She does look terribly strong."

"And cruel, Anne, as if she might hurt him. I don't want him to be hurt.
I can't bear her taking him away from me. My little Col-Col....I did
hope, Anne, that if you wouldn't have Eliot--"

"I'd have Colin? But Auntie, I'm years older than he is. He's a baby."

"If he's a baby he'll want somebody older to look after him."

"Queenie's even better fitted than I am, then."

"Do you think, Anne, she proposed to Colin?"

"No. I shouldn't think it was necessary."

"I should say she was capable of anything. My only hope is they'll tire
each other out before they're married and break it off."

All afternoon on the tennis court below Queenie played against Colin.
She played vigorously, excitedly, savagely, to win. She couldn't hide
her annoyance when he beat her.

"What was I to do?" he said. "You don't like it when I beat you. But if
I was beaten you wouldn't like _me_."


ii

Adeline's only hope was not realized. They hadn't had time to tire of
each other before the War broke out. And Colin insisted on marrying
before he joined up. Their engagement had left him nervous and unfit,
and his idea was that, once married, he would present a better
appearance before the medical examiners.

But after a month of Queenie, Colin was more nervous and unfit than
ever.

"I can't think," said Adeline, "what that woman does to him. She'll wear
him out."

So Colin waited, trying to get fitter, and afraid to volunteer lest he
should be rejected.

Everybody around him was moving rapidly. Queenie had taken up motoring,
so that she could drive an ambulance car at the front. Anne had gone up
to London for her Red Cross training. Eliot had left his practice to his
partner at Penang and had come home and joined the Army Medical Corps.

Eliot, home on leave for three days before he went out, tried hard to
keep Colin back from the War. In Eliot's opinion Colin was not fit and
never would be fit to fight. He was just behaving as he always had
behaved, rushing forward, trying insanely to do the thing he never could
do.

"Do you mean to say they won't pass me?" he asked.

"Oh, they'll pass you all right," Eliot said. "They'll give you an
expensive training, and send you into the trenches, and in any time from
a day to a month you'll be in hospital with shell-shock. Then you'll be
discharged as unfit, having wasted everybody's time and made a damned
nuisance of yourself....I suppose I ought to say it's splendid of you to
want to go out. But it isn't splendid. It's idiotic. You'll be simply
butting in where you're not wanted, taking a better man's place, taking
a better man's commission, taking a better man's bed in a hospital. I
tell you we don't want men who are going to crumple up in their first
action."

"Do you think I'm going to funk then?" said poor Colin.

"Funk? Oh, Lord no. You'll stick it till you drop, till you're
paralyzed, till you've lost your voice and memory, till you're an utter
wreck. There'll be enough of 'em, poor devils, without you, Col-Col."

"But why should I go like that more than anybody else?"

"Because you're made that way, because you haven't got a nervous system
that can stand the racket. The noises alone will do for you. You'll be
as right as rain if you keep out of it."

"But Jerrold's coming back. _He_'ll go out at once. How can I stick at
home when he's gone?"

"Heaps of good work to be done at home."

"Not by men of my age."

"By men of your nervous organization. Your going out would be sheer
waste."

"Why not?" Does it matter what becomes of me?"

"No. It doesn't. It matters, though, that you'll be taking a better
man's place."

Now Colin really did want to go out and fight, as he had always wanted
to follow Jerrold's lead; he wanted it so badly that it seemed to him a
form of self-indulgence; and this idea of taking a better man's place so
worked on him that he had almost decided to give it up, since that was
the sacrifice required of him, when he told Queenie what Eliot had said.

"All I can say is," said Queenie, "that if you don't go out I shall give
_you_ up. I've no use for men with cold feet."

"Can't you see," said Colin (he almost hated Queenie in that moment),
"what I'm afraid of? Being a damned nuisance. That's what Eliot says
I'll be. I don't know how he knows."

"He doesn't know everything. If _my_ brother tried to stop my going to
the front I'd jolly soon tell him to go to hell. I swear, Colin, if you
back out of it I won't speak to you again. I'm not asking you to do
anything I funk myself."

"Oh, shut up. I'm going all right. Not because you've asked me, but
because I want to."

"If you didn't I should think you'd feel pretty rotten when I'm out with
my Field Ambulance," said Queenie.

"Damn your Field Ambulance!... No, I didn't mean that, old thing; it's
splendid of you to go. But you'd no business to suppose I funked. I
_may_ funk. Nobody knows till they've tried. But I was going all right
till Eliot put me off."

"Oh, if you're put off as easily as all that----"

She was intolerable. She seemed to think he was only going because she'd
shamed him into it.

That evening he sang:

  "'What are you doing all the day, Rendal, my son?
  What are you doing all the day, my pretty one?'"

He understood that song now.

  "'What will you leave to your lover, Rendal, my son?
  What will you leave to your lover, my pretty one?
  A rope to hang her, mother,
  A rope to hang her, mother....'"

"Go it, Col-Col!" Out on the terrace Queenie laughed her harsh, cruel
laugh.

  "'For I'm sick to my heart and I fain would lie down.'"

"'I'm sick to my heart and I fain would lie down,'" Queenie echoed, with
clipped words, mocking him.

He hated Queenie.

And he loved her. At night, at night, she would unbend, she would be
tender and passionate, she would touch him with quick, hurrying
caresses, she would put her arms round him and draw him to her, kissing
and kissing. And with her young, beautiful body pressed tight to him,
with her mouth on his and her eyes shining close and big in the
darkness, Colin would forget.


iii

    Dr. Cutler's Field Ambulance, British Hospital, Antwerp.

    _September 20th, 1914._

    Dearest Auntie Adeline,--I haven't been able to write before.
    There's been a lot of fighting all round here and we're
    frightfully busy getting in wounded. And when you've done you're
    too tired to sit up and write letters. You simply roll into bed
    and drop off to sleep. Sometimes we're out with the ambulances
    half the night.

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

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

    Good-bye, darling. Take care of yourself.

    Your loving

    Anne.

    Antwerp. _October 3rd._

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

    FURNES.

    _November._

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

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

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


iv


Five months later.

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

    _May 30th, 1915._

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

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

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

    Your loving

    Adeline Fielding.

Three months later.

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

    _August 30th._

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

    Your loving

    Adeline Fielding.

    Nieuport. _September 5th, 1915._

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