FullReads

Two days before the opening she turned from a dispirited rehearsal to see Mabel standing in the wings. Then she knew. The end had come.

Mabel was jaunty, but rather uneasy.

“You poor dear!” she said, when Edith went to her. “What on earth’s happened? The cable only said–honest, dearie, I feel like a dog!”

“They don’t like me. That’s all,” she replied wearily, and picked up her hat and jacket from a chair. But Mabel was curious. Uncomfortable, too, as she had said. She slipped an arm round Edith’s waist.

“Say the word and I’ll throw them down,” she cried. “It looks like dirty work to me. And you’re thin. Honest, dearie, I mean it.”

Her loyalty soothed the girl’s sore spirit.

“I don’t know what’s come over me,” she said. “I’ve tried hard enough. But I’m always tired. I–I think it’s being so close to the war.”

Mabel stared at her. There was a war. She knew that. The theatrical news was being crowded to a back page to make space for disagreeable diagrams and strange, throaty names.

“I know. It’s fierce, isn’t it?” she said.

Edith took her home, and they talked far into the night. She had slipped Cecil’s picture into the wardrobe before she turned on the light. Then she explained the situation.

“It’s pep they want, is it?” said Mabel at last. “Well, believe me, honey, I’ll give it to them. And as long as I’ve got a cent it’s yours.”

They slept together in Edith’s narrow bed, two slim young figures delicately flushed with sleep. As pathetic, had they known it, as those other sleepers in their untidy billets across the channel. Almost as hopeless too. Dwellers in the neutral ground.

V

Now war, after all, is to each fighting man an affair of small numbers, an affair of the men to his right and his left, of the A.M.S.C. in the rear and of a handful of men across. On his days of rest the horizon is somewhat expanded. It becomes then a thing of crowded and muddy village streets, of food and drink and tobacco and a place to sleep.

Always, of course, it is a thing of noises.

This is not a narrative of war. It matters very little, for instance, how Cecil’s regiment left Salisbury and went to Soissons, in France. What really matters is that at last the Canadian-made motor lorries moved up their equipment, and that, after digging practice trenches in the yellow clay of old battlefields, they were moved up to the front.

Once there, there seemed to be a great deal of time. It was the lull before Neuve Chapelle. Cecil’s spirit grew heavy with waiting. Once, back on rest at his billet, he took a long walk over the half-frozen side roads and came without warning on a main artery. Three traction engines were taking to the front the first of the great British guns, so long awaited. He took the news back to his mess. The general verdict was that there would be something doing now.

Cecil wrote a letter to Edith that day. He had written before, of course, but this was different. He wrote first to his mother, just in case anything happened, a long, boyish letter with a misspelled word here and there. He said he was very happy and very comfortable, and that if he did get his he wanted her to know that it was all perfectly cheerful and not anything like the war correspondents said it was. He’d had a bully time all his life, thanks to her. He hadn’t let her know often enough how he felt about her, and she knew he was a dub at writing. There were a great many things worse than “going out” in a good fight. “It isn’t at all as if you could see the blooming thing coming,” he wrote. “You never know it’s after you until you’ve got it, and then you don’t.”

The letter was not to be sent unless he was killed. So he put in a few anecdotes to let her know exactly how happy and contented he was. Then he dropped the whole thing in the ten inches of mud and water he was standing in, and had to copy it all over.