Our Casualty, and Other Stories Part 10

"I'm not going there," said Thompson, "or I'd offer to show you the way.

But you can't miss it. You can see the spire from the window. It's the finest specimen of early Gothic in the north of France. The gla.s.s is superb. There's an altar piece by Raphael or Botticelli, I forget which.

The screen is late Italian Renaissance, and there's a tomb in the west transept which is supposed to be that of the Venerable Bede."

The girl got up and walked out of the room. I was not surprised.

"Thompson," I said, "what do you mean by behaving like a cad? Any one could see that she is a nice girl; a lady, not that sort at all."

Thompson grinned.

"And as for that rigmarole of yours about the cathedral--what the devil do you know about Italian Renaissance, or Botticelli or early Gothic? I never heard such rot in my life. As a matter of fact I've always heard that the gla.s.s in this cathedral is poor."

"All the same," said Thompson, "if she goes there she'll be pleased.

She'll find something she'll like a great deal better than stained gla.s.s."

"As for the Venerable Bede," I said, "he was buried in Oxford if he was buried anywhere, and I don't know that he was. He might have been cremated, or minced up by high explosives so that they couldn't bury him."

"I thought I recognized her," said Thompson, "I went over to her table and had a good look to make sure."

"Don't pretend you know her," I said "She certainly didn't know you."

"I looked at her photograph five times at least last night while you were asleep."

I thought this over for a minute. Then I said:

"You don't mean to tell me that she's the girl that boy is engaged to be married to?"

"The exact same girl," said Thompson. "I couldn't be mistaken."

I meditated on the situation.

"I hope," I said, "that he won't have left the cathedral before she gets there."

"No fear," said Thompson, "he's a most conscientious boy. Having started out to do that cathedral he'll look at every stone of it before he leaves. He'll be there for hours yet. What I'm afraid of is that she won't go there."

"She started in the right direction," I said "I saw her out of the window."

"I did my best anyhow," said Thompson. "I told her I wasn't going there.

She didn't like me. I could see that. If I'd let her think I was going to the cathedral she'd have marched straight off to the station and sat in the Ladies' Waiting-room till her train started."

The girl, it appeared, did visit the cathedral and the boy was there. He was waiting for us on the platform at the railway station at half-past nine. He talked half the night to Thompson about his wonderful stroke of luck. Just as I dropped off to sleep I heard Thompson quoting Shakespeare. It was, to the best of my belief, the only time in his life that Thompson ever did quote Shakespeare.

"Journeys end in lovers' meeting, Every wise man's son doth know,"

he said.

VII-- HIS GIRL

There were thirty or forty officers in the lounge of the hotel, all condemned, as I was, to spend the greater part of the day there. Some men have better luck. It was the fourth time I had been held up in this wretched place on my way back to France after leave. Dragged out of our beds at an unreasonable hour, crammed into a train at Victoria, rushed down to an embarkation port as if the fate of the empire depended on our getting there without a minute's delay, we find, when we get out of the train, that the steamer will not start for three hours, four hours, on this occasion six hours. We are compelled to sit about in an hotel, desolate and disgusted, when we might have been comfortable in London.

I looked round to see if there were anyone I wanted to talk to. There were--I had seen them at Victoria--three or four men whom I knew slightly, but I had no particular wish to spend hours with any one of them. I had just decided to go out for a walk by myself when I felt a slap on my shoulder. I turned and saw Daintree. I was uncommonly glad to see him. Daintree and I were friends before the war and I have always found him an amusing companion. He greeted me heartily.

"Great luck," he said, "running into you like this. I don't see a single other man I know in the whole crowd. And any way I particularly wanted to talk to you. I've got a story to tell you."

We secured a corner and two comfortable chairs. I lit a pipe and waited.

Daintree is a wonderful man for picking up stories. The most unusual things happen to him and he gets mixed up in far more adventures than anyone else I know. And he likes telling stories. Usually, the men who have stories to tell will not talk, and the men who like talking have nothing interesting to tell. Daintree is exceptional.

"What is it this time?" I asked. "What journalists call a 'sob story,'

or is it meant to be humorous?"

"I should call it a kind of joke," said Daintree; "but my wife says it's the most pathetic thing she's ever heard. It makes her cry even to think of it You can take it either way. I'll be interested to see how you do take it. I was thinking of writing it to you, 'for your information and necessary action, please.' My wife wanted me to, but it's too long for a letter. Besides, I don't see what you or anyone else could possibly do in the matter. You may give advice--that's what my wife expects of you--but there's really no advice to give. However, you can tell me how it strikes you. That's what I want to know, whether you agree with my wife or with me. You know Simc.o.x, don't you, or do you? I forget."

"Simc.o.x?" I said. "Is that a tall, cadaverous man in the Wess.e.x? Rather mournful looking?"

"That's the man. Came home from a remote corner of the Argentine, or somewhere like that, early in the war, and got a commission. He's a captain now."

"I met him," I said, "down Albert way, shortly before the push last year. I can't say I knew him. He seemed to me rather a difficult kind of man to know."

"So my wife says," said Daintree. "He's older than most of us, for one thing, and has spent twenty years all by himself herding sheep or branding bullocks, or whatever it is they do out in those places.

Naturally he'd rather lost touch with life at home and found it difficult to fit himself in; especially with a lot of boys straight from the 'Varsities or school. They were mostly boys in his battalion.

Anyhow, he seems to have been a bit morose, but he did his job all right in the regiment and was recommended for the M.C.. He got knocked out in the Somme push and jolly nearly lost a leg. They saved it in the end and sent him down to my place to convalesce."

Daintree owns a very nice place in the Midlands. In the old days it was one of the pleasantest houses I know to stay in. Daintree himself was a capital host and his wife is a charming woman. The house is a convalescent home for officers now, and Mrs. Daintree, with the help of three nurses, runs it. Daintree pretends to regard this as a grievance, and says it was all his wife's doing, though he was just as keen on the place as she was.

"d.a.m.ned nuisance," he said, "finding the place full of boys rioting when I get home on leave. And it's full up now--twelve of them, no less. There's hardly a spot in the house I can call my own, and they've spoiled the little lake I made at the bottom of the lawn. That young a.s.s Pat Singleton started what he called boat-races on it----"

"Oh, Pat Singleton's there?" I said. "I knew; he'd been wounded, but I didn't hear he'd been sent to your place."

"Pat Singleton's always everywhere," said Daintree. "I've never come across a place where he wasn't, and he's a devil for mischief. Remind me afterwards to tell you about the trick he played on the princ.i.p.al nurse, a Scotchwoman with a perfectly terrific sense of her own dignity,"

Daintree chuckled.

"If you'd rather tell me that story," I said, "instead of the one about Simc.o.x, I'd just as soon have it. In fact, I'd prefer it. Sob stories are always trying."

"But I'm not sure that the Simc.o.x one is a sob story, though there's a certain amount of slosh in it. Anyhow, I've got to tell it to you, for my wife says you're the only man she knows who can advise what ought to be done."

"All right," I said, "but Pat Singleton's escapades always amuse me. I'd like to hear about his making an apple-pie bed for that nurse."

Daintree chuckled again, and I gathered from the expression of his face that the nurse had endured something worse than an apple-pie bed.

"Or about the boat-races," I said. "I didn't know you had anything which floated on that lake of yours."

"I haven't," said Daintree, "except the kind of wooden box in which the gardener goes out to clear away the duck-weed. However, Pat Singleton comes into the Simc.o.x story in the end. It's really about him that my wife wants your advice."

"No one," I said, "can give advice about Pat Singleton."

"Knowing the sort of man Simc.o.x is," said Daintree, "you'll understand that he was rather out of it at first in a-house full of boys just out of hospital and jolly glad to have a chance of running about a bit. Pat Singleton wasn't there when Simc.o.x arrived. But the others were nearly as bad; silly jokes from morning to night and an infernal row always going on. My wife likes that sort of thing, fortunately."