Anne Severn and the Fieldings Part 28

"It's quiet enough now."

"It isn't. It's full of noises. Loud, thundering noises going on and on.

Awful noises.... You know what it is? It's the guns in France. I can hear them all the time."

"No, Colin. That isn't what you hear. We're much too far off. n.o.body could hear them."

"_I_ can."

"I don't think so."

"Do you mean it's noises in my head?"

"Yes. They'll go away when you're stronger."

"I shall never be strong again."

"Oh yes, you will be. You're better already."

"If I get better they'll send me out again."

"Never. Never again."

"I ought to be out. I oughtn't to be sticking here doing nothing....

Anne, you don't think Queenie'll come over, do you?"

"No, I don't. She's got much too much to do out there."

"You know, that's what I'm afraid of, more than anything, Queenie's coming. She'll tell me I funked. She thinks I funked. She thinks that's what's the matter with me."

"She doesn't. She knows it's your body, not you. Your nerves are shaken to bits, that's all."

"I didn't funk, Anne." (He said it for the hundredth time.) "I mean I stuck it all right. I went back after I had sh.e.l.l-shock the first time--straight back into the trenches. It was at the very end of the fighting that I got it again. Then I couldn't go back. I couldn't move."

"I know, Colin, I know."

"Does Queenie know?"

"Of course she does. She understands perfectly. Why, she sees men with sh.e.l.l-shock every day. She knows you were splendid."

"I wasn't. But I wasn't as bad as she thinks me. ... Don't let her see me if she comes back."

"She won't come."

"She will. She will. She'll get leave some day. Tell her not to come.

Tell her she can't see me. Say I'm off my head. Any old lie that'll stop her."

"Don't think about her."

"I can't help thinking. She said such beastly things. You can't think what disgusting things she said."

"She says them to everybody. She doesn't mean them."

"Oh, doesn't she!... Is that mother? You might tell her I'm sleeping."

For Colin was afraid of his mother, too. He was afraid that she would talk, that she would talk about the War and about Jerrold. Colin had been home six weeks and he had not once spoken Jerrold's name. He read his letters and handed them to Anne and Adeline without a word. It was as if between him and the thought of Jerrold there was darkness and a supreme, nameless terror.

One morning at dawn Anne was wakened by Colin's voice in her room.

"Anne, are you awake?"

The room was full of the white dawn. She saw him standing in it by her bedside.

"My head's awfully queer," he said. "I can feel my brain shaking and wobbling inside it, as if the convolutions had come undone. Could they?"

"Of course they couldn't."

"The noise might have loosened them."

"It isn't your brain you feel, Colin. It's your nerves. It's just the shock still going on in them."

"Is it never going to stop?"

"Yes, when you're stronger. Go back to bed and I'll come to you."

He went back. She slipped on her dressing-gown and came to him. She sat by his bed and put her hand on his forehead.

"There--it stops when you put your hand on."

"Yes. And you'll sleep."

Presently, to her joy, he slept.

She stood up and looked at him as he lay there in the white dawn. He was utterly innocent, utterly pathetic in his sleep, and beautiful. Sleep smoothed out his vexed face and brought back the likeness of the boy Colin, Jerrold's brother.

That morning a letter came to her from Jerrold. He wrote: "Don't worry too much about Col-Col. He'll be all right as long as you'll look after him."

She thought: "I wonder whether he remembers that he asked me to."

But she was glad he was not there to hear Colin scream.

iii

"Anne, can _you_ sleep?" said Adeline. Colin had gone to bed and they were sitting together in the drawing-room for the last hour of the evening.

"Not very well, when Colin has such bad nights."

"Do you think he's ever going to get right again?"