Anne Severn and the Fieldings Part 27

I don't like to lose you, and I know you've done splendidly. But I've got to choose between Queenie and you, and I must keep her, if it's only because she's worked with me all the time. So now that you've made the break I take the opportunity of asking you to resign. Personally I'm sorry, but the good of the Corps must come before everything.

Sincerely yours,

Robert Cutler.

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

_September 11th, 1915._

Dear d.i.c.ky,--This is only to say good-bye, as I shan't see you again. Cutler's fired me out of the Corps. He _says_ it's because Queenie and I don't hit it off. I shouldn't have thought that was my fault, but he seems to think it is. He says there's been perfect peace since I left.

Well, we've had some tremendous times together, and I wish we could have gone on.

Good-bye and Good Luck,

Yours ever,

Anne Severn.

P. S.--Poor Colin Fielding's in an awful state. But he's been a bit better since I came. Even if Cutler'd let me come back I couldn't leave him. This is my job. The queer thing is he's afraid of Queenie, so it's just as well she didn't come home.

Nieuport.

_September 15th, 1915._

Dear Old Thing,--We're all furious here at the way you've been treated. I've resigned as a protest, and I'm going into the R.

A. M. So has Miss Mullins--: resigned I mean--so Queenie's the only woman left in the Corps. That'll suit her down to the ground.

I gave myself the treat of telling Cutler what I jolly well think of him. But of course you know she made him hoof you out.

She's been trying for it ever since you joined. It's all rot his saying you didn't hit it off with her, when everybody knows you were a perfect angel to her. Why, you backed her every time when we were all going for her. It's quite true that the peace of G.o.d has settled on the Corps since you left it; but that's only because Queenie doesn't rage round any more.

You'll observe that she never went for Miss Mullins. That's because Miss Mullins kept well out of the line of fire. And if you hadn't jolly well distinguished yourself there she'd have let you alone, too. The real trouble began that day you were at Dixmude. It wasn't a bit because she was afraid you'd be killed.

Queenie doesn't want you about when the War medals are handed round. Everybody sees that but old Cutler. He's too much gone on her to see anything. She can twist him round and round and tie him up in knots.

But Cutler isn't in it now. Queenie's turned him down for that young Noel Fenwick who's got your job. Cutler's nose was a sight, I can tell you.

Well, I'm not surprised that Queenie's husband funks her. She's a terror. Worse than war.

Good-bye and Good Luck, Old Thing, till we meet again.

Yours ever,

d.i.c.ky Cartwright.

VII

ADELINE

i

They would never know what it cost her to come back and look after Colin. That knowledge was beyond Adeline Fielding. She congratulated Anne and expected Anne to congratulate herself on being "well out of it." Her safety was revolting and humiliating to Anne when she thought of Queenie and Cutler and d.i.c.ky, and Eliot and Jerrold and all the allied armies in the thick of it. She had left a world where life was lived at its highest pitch of intensity for a world where people were only half-alive. To be safe from the chance of sudden violent death was to be only half-alive.

Her one consolation had been that now she would see Jerrold. But she did not see him. Jerrold had given up his appointment in the Punjaub three weeks before the outbreak of the war. His return coincided with the retreat from Mons. He had not been in England a week before he was in training on Salisbury Plain. Anne had left Wyck when he arrived; and before he got leave she was in Belgium with her Field Ambulance. And now, in October of nineteen fifteen, when she came back to Wyck, Jerrold was fighting in France.

At least they knew what had happened to Colin; but about Eliot and Jerrold they knew nothing. Anything might have happened to them since they had written the letters that let them off from week to week, telling them that they were safe. Anything might happen and they might never know.

Anne's fear was dumb and secret. She couldn't talk about Jerrold. She lived every minute in terror of Adeline's talking, of the cries that came from her at queer unexpected moments: between two cups of tea, two glances at the mirror, two careful gestures of her hands pinning up her hair.

"I cannot bear it if anything happens to Jerrold, Anne."

"Oh Anne, I wonder what's happening to Jerrold."

"If only I knew what was happening to Jerrold."

"If only I knew where Jerrold _was_. Nothing's so awful as not knowing."

And at breakfast, over toast and marmalade: "Anne, I've got such an awful feeling that something's happened to Jerrold. I'm sure these feelings aren't given you for nothing... You aren't eating anything, darling. You _must_ eat."

Every morning at breakfast Anne had to look through the lists of killed, missing and wounded, to save Adeline the shock of coming upon Jerrold's or Eliot's name. Every morning Adeline gazed at Anne across the table with the same look of strained and agonised enquiry. Every morning Anne's heart tightened and dragged, then loosened and lifted, as they were let off for one more day.

One more day? Not one more hour, one minute. Any second the wire from the War Office might come.

ii

Anne never knew the moment when she was first aware that Colin's mother was afraid of him. Aunt Adeline was very busy, making swabs and bandages. Every day she went off to her War Hospital Supply work at the Town Hall, and Anne was left to take care of Colin. She began to wonder whether the swabs and bandages were not a pretext for getting away from Colin.

"It's no use," Adeline said. "I cannot stand the strain of it. Anne, he's worse with me than he is with you. Everything I say and do is wrong. You don't know what it was like before you came."

Anne did know. The awful thing was that Colin couldn't bear to be left alone, day or night. He would lie awake shivering with terror. If he dropped off to sleep he woke screaming. At first Pinkney slept with him.

But Pinkney had joined up, and old Wilkins, the butler, was impossible because he snored.

Anne had her old room across the pa.s.sage where she had slept when they were children. And now, as then, their doors were left open, so that at a sound from Colin she could get up and go to him.

She was used to the lacerating, unearthly scream that woke her, the scream that terrified Adeline, that made her cover her head tight with the bed-clothes, to shut it out, that made her lock her door to shut out Colin. Once he had come into his mother's room and she had found him standing by her bed and looking at her with the queer frightened face that frightened her. She was always afraid of this happening again.

Anne couldn't bear to think of that locked door. She was used to the sight of Colin standing in her doorway, to the watches beside his bed where he lay shivering, holding her hand tight as he used to hold it when he was a child. To Anne he was "poor Col-Col" again, the little boy who was afraid of ghosts, only more abandoned to terror, more unresisting.

He would start and tremble at any quick, unexpected movement. He would burst into tears at any sudden sound. Small noises, whisperings, murmurings, creakings, soft shufflings, irritated him. Loud noises, the slamming of doors, the barking of dogs, the crowing of c.o.c.ks, made him writhe in agony. For Colin the deep silence of the Manor was the ambush for some stupendous, crashing, annihilating sound; sound that was always coming and never came. The droop of the mouth that used to appear suddenly in his moments of childish anguish was fixed now, and fixed the little tortured twist of his eyebrows and his look of anxiety and fear.

His head drooped, his shoulders were hunched slightly, as if he cowered before some perpetually falling blow.

On fine warm days he lay out on the terrace on Adeline's long chair; on wet days he lay on the couch in the library, or sat crouching over the fire. Anne brought him milk or beef tea or Benger's Food every two hours. He was content to be waited on; he had no will to move, no desire to get up and do things for himself. He lay or sat still, shivering every now and then as he remembered or imagined some horror. And as he was afraid to be left alone Anne sat with him.

"How can you say this is a quiet place?" he said.