The girls at his billet

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRIGHTFUL ROW

My mind was in such a whirl of feelings that I really don't know whether I was most petrified with amazement or dumb with anger. I, that had been known from childhood's hours as "Rattle," was too flabbergasted to have a single syllable to say for myself.

He spoke first. As usual, he said something that nobody else in the world would have the absolute cheek to: for he said, quite angrily, and as if he were talking to some naughty little girl: "There, now! See what you have done! You have torn my photograph!"

"Your photograph!"

I simply gasped as I said it. Then, collecting my breath and my scattered wits, I went on again: "It's my photograph, a photograph of me—you know it is. How dare you have it!"

"You—I mean—it was sent to me," said Mr. Frank Lascelles.

I felt that I had turned as red as his own horrid hair. But I stood my ground, and spoke as dignifiedly as I possibly could.

"Oh, then you admit it. You—you are the man who has been writing letters to me——"

"Yes, I am."

"Pretending," I said witheringly, "to be a lonely subaltern! Pretending that you couldn't make yourself liked!"

"Pretending?" The Incubus brazened it out. "Not much pretence about that."

"Oh! What an awful story!" I said downrightedly. "Apart from everything else, what a—what an untruther you are! You said you weren't popular."

"Well? I'm not."

"You are. All your idiots of men seem to adore you. How they can I don't know."

"Thank you," he said. "That's what I meant. It's you I'm unpopular with. You know you've had a 'down' on me——"

"Well, d'you wonder?" I snapped, glaring at him with whole Hymns of Hate in my eyes. "Haven't I an excuse?"—waving the torn photograph.

"Yes, you may have now. But that's only since this minute. You hadn't before," he went on. "And you began to have that 'down' the moment I arrived here. Why? Will you explain?"

Well, I couldn't. I couldn't say that it started the first minute that he came upon me in the kitchen, talking loudly about HIM. I couldn't explain that it was all part and parcel of my being ashamed of having played cards for him, and made plans about him, even if it was in fun, before he came! I said: "Anyhow, I shall have a much worse 'down' after this! I don't know what you have to say for yourself, Mr. Lascelles."

"A great deal," he said. Then he put on a more ingratiating sort of tone. He said: "Look here, I may be a rotter in many ways, but I'm dashed if I see how I've deserved your considering me such a—such an impossible sort of person. I'd give anything to have you like me, even a tiny bit, Miss—Elizabeth!"

He was trying to get round me. But I'm not soft-hearted like Nancy. I wasn't going to allow him to.

"I wish——" he began again.

"It's a wish you never will get, if it is that we should be friends," said I. "I—I dislike you instinctively."

"So it seems. I saw that."

"And you tried to pay me out by playing tricks on me," I said, beginning to realise more clearly what had happened, and getting angrier than ever. "You thought that if you could get me to write letters to you and send you my photograph, you'd turn round some day and show them to me, and that would be your revenge!"

"I never thought anything of the kind!" he declared, fearfully angry himself. "I only wanted to get to know you! And you've been turning me down with a loud bang every time I've spoken to you. I didn't know how to get hold of the crab. This seemed the only way."

"It is a most dishonourable and sneaky way," I said hotly. "It was not fair."

Mr. Lascelles, standing there with his torn half of the photograph still between his finger and thumb, and with the ink still trickling down over the edge of the writing-table—Mr. Lascelles said: "You know, they say all is fair in—in war! And, after all, this is war-time, you know!"

"Some people seem to think that's an excuse for absolutely everything nowadays," I told him. "But there are some things at which one has got to draw the line! I can't tell you," I said, suddenly boiling over again with rage, "what I think of you!"

Then the Pretender said another unforgivable thing. He said, "In your letters you didn't seem to mind me."

"Because I didn't know it was you. I thought it was somebody——" Well, I couldn't say "nice." So I said rather lamely, "somebody lonely, who really needed my—my——"

"I did need your letters," the Incubus put in. "I knew that you'd never write if you'd known it was me, that you'd got your knife into!"

"Known? If I had known, I——" Here I sort of clutched about for words and couldn't find any. I simply had to repeat myself and say, "I can't—I can't tell you what I think."

"Could you write it?" suggested Mr. Lascelles quite meekly.

But there was a laugh in his voice. I heard it. There was a twinkle in his eye. I saw it!

Well, at that I was so angry that I know now exactly what people mean when they say "that they see red." A mist seemed to come before my eyes, a red mist of the same colour as Mr. Lascelles's locks, and then——

Well—I am almost too ashamed to write it! To use one of Aunt Victoria's old-fashioned words, it certainly was an unladylike thing to do—I had done it before I had thought—or something did it for me! Something lifted my arm and took direct aim. A sound rang out that I should think they could have heard from the Ford, clearer than the sound of rifles practising at the range.

For I slapped his face as hard as I possibly could with my open hand!

The second afterwards I was so ashamed of myself that I wished I'd never been born. I wished the dining-room floor would open and swallow me up: it often creaks as if it were going to!

But not it.

There I stood, still panting with temper, and gazing at the red mark of my own hand (not by any means a microscopic one) on the Incubus's smooth and freckled cheek.

He glared back up at me with eyes like grey-blue icicles, if you can imagine them. Then with a movement, as quick as a cat putting out a claw to scratch, he seized my hand—the one that slapped him.

I was terrified for a minute. I was so certain what would happen next. I knew that he was going to kiss me by force, as a punishment.

I had read in a book that a man who has had his face slapped by a girl has the right to kiss her in anger, and that she deserves it. (It's just "reprisals," like we ought to take on the Germans for murdering babies.)

And you know men always seem to be much stronger than we are, even if we are six foot, and they (the reprisaling men) are tiny!

I flung my head back and screwed my face as far to one side as I could. If he had kissed it, I'm sure it would have come out all over Spotted Plague, from sheer temper, and given him blood-poisoning!

However, thank goodness, the little horror didn't even try to touch my face.

Instead of that he took my hand, the one that had slapped him. He crushed it in his and then put it to his mouth, and kissed it. First the fingers and then the palm, as if he'd never had anything to kiss in his whole life before.

"There!" he said, rather breathlessly. "You needn't think——"

But what he meant that I "needn't think" I shall never know, for at that moment I heard the footsteps of Mary, our housemaid, coming along the passage to what she calls "see about the dining-room fire."

I wasn't going to let her come in and find me there. No: not with the whole atmosphere quivering with slaps and kisses, thank you: not with me and the Incubus standing facing each other like a Christmas number supplement called "The Lovers' Quarrel," by Marcus Stone, or something like that.

Not much!

So up I flung the dining-room window, and out I tore through the laurustinus bushes, with no hat, and just my blue sports coat on, and with my half of the torn photograph grasped firmly in my hand.

He shall never have that again, anyhow!

And I hope that I jolly well hurt him, even if I am ashamed that I did!

For oh, what a beastly thing he's done to me! Not so much by pretending to be the Lonely Subaltern, but by not being it.... That sounds muddled, but if you're a girl you'll understand what I mean, and if you're a man you'll never understand anything. At least, not if you're a man like that loathsome little bank-clerk of a temporary second lieutenant.

I feel he's robbed me of a friend, for the Lonely Subaltern would have been a friend, if his letters had been real letters—I mean, if it hadn't been the Incubus who'd written them. And now all that promising new interest has gone out of my life with a loud bang. I shall have nothing to console myself with now when I feel bored with life and nobody loves me. I shan't be able to take the Lonely Subaltern's letters out now and purr over them to myself. Good gracious, no! I shall feel ill at the very sight of a letter addressed to me for the next fortnight. And, of course, I shall take the Incubus's detestable letters and do them up in a big envelope with lumps of sealing-wax over it and register it back to Frank Lascelles, Esquire, at the Moated Grange....

No: I can't do that. Mrs. Miles at the post-office would wonder what on earth was in the packet and why I was sending things through the post to the young orficer gentleman that lives in our very house, and she'd ask Mary, our housemaid, and——

Oh, anybody who's ever lived in a village will know the yards and yards that get added in this way to the "Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood."

That wouldn't do.

Besides, I can't have the little brute writing back to acknowledge the receipt.

And I'm not going to give them into his own hands, either.

I shall tear them all up into the teeniest scraps, and burn them in my bedroom grate.

No, I won't, either. I'll keep them as they are: it'll serve him right!

CHAPTER IX

ANOTHER SHOCK!

You know how fast you can walk when you're angry and don't see where you are going?

Well, that was me as I tore out of our garden (still hatless and in my Saxe blue woolly coat) down the road towards Nowhere Junction and then came to the field that leads in the direction of the Ford. It might have been Hyde Park for all I saw of it, but close to the stile I was reminded of where I was by the tramp of feet on the frosty road (thanks be it's dry frost at last for a change) and the sound of men's voices singing in parts a hymn tune with these words:

"When we get our civvy clothes on,
O 'ow 'appy we shall be!
When this blooming war is o—ver,
No more soldiering for me!"

It was a squad of that regiment called "The Super-Filberts," marching at ease after a class.

Behind them came their officer, the sort of young man who is awfully nice, but whom you feel you must have met before somewhere because he is so like thousands of pictures of our gallant defenders in the Sunday Herald.

With him came another tall, rather disconsolate figure in khaki, wearing eyeglasses—Nancy's friend, Mr. Curtis!

At that moment I was so infuriated against Mr. Lascelles that I felt just as angry with anything calling itself his friend. So I only gave the very curtest nod when he and the other officer saluted me. Salutes are "no treat to me" now—as the bus driver said about the ladies' ankles.

I presently came to a field where I had to pass a guard of soldiers, who challenged me, and then, smiling, let me go on. I had to pick my way pretty carefully. It was a perfect honeycomb of wet and muddy ditches—trenches that the "Super-Filberts" had been digging under the instruction of Mr. Curtis, who is an instructor, I may mention. I looked into them, and simply couldn't help heaving a tiny sigh of pity for the poor darlings out there "somewhere in France." They have to live in those trenches for weeks on end. How on earth do they ever keep their poor feet dry? Or do they give up all hope of trying to?

Some way away from the trenches, there was a deeper hole covered over. I had heard the Incubus explaining to Evelyn that this was the entrance to a "sap"—one of the long tunnels which the men go down to lay a charge of gunpowder.

I put aside the wooden cover, which was like the door of the open mouth of a well, looking right down into the beginning of the sap. It looked so narrow that I couldn't possibly imagine anybody working there except a mole or something about the size of that scrubby little Mr. Lascelles. Never mind him, though. I had come out here to try to forget him. So, beginning to feel angry again, on I pranced, towards what they call "the fortified house" at the other end of the field.

Now, the fortified house is a square, stone-built farm affair, which has been bought by the military authorities for instruction purposes. The inside roofs and some of the inner walls have been knocked down.

And the windows have all been boarded up, and instead of them there are wicked little square holes everywhere just big enough to put the muzzle of a machine-gun through. A lot of the classes for defence and that sort of thing take place up at this house. But, of course, there wouldn't be a soul about there now, as it was four o'clock.

The sun was beginning to set behind the trees just like an old-fashioned Christmas card, and I had met the class, of course, marching away.

I peeped in through the open, doorless entrance of the house and tried to imagine what it must be like to find yourself one of a lot of soldiers working those machine-guns, with perhaps half of your comrades fallen around you and scarcely enough ammunition to hold out until the relief comes up, and a strong surrounding force of horrible grey-coated Boches creeping nearer and nearer!

I was just thinking this when I jumped back with a little scream.

"Hullo! What is it? Oh!——"

For a moment I felt as if my imaginings had come true. I thought that there before me, out of the fortified house, was slinking and stealing the stealthy grey-clad form of one of those Germans.

Then I saw what it was. And I burst out laughing, in relief, at the cause of my absurd fright. For the man who had slipped quietly out of the house, touching his old felt hat to me, was nothing more alarming than an English labourer.

Besides this, it was a labourer whom I knew! It was no one more or less than our nice old Penny, the gardener, with that pathetic old black wig of his, who has been working for Aunt Victoria since before we girls came to live with her at Mud Flats.

"Good evening, missie. What a fright you gave me!" he said in his nice, kind, affectionate voice. He is very fond of all of us—a real old-fashioned English servant, who is more of a friend than anything else, as Aunt Victoria says. "What are you doing out here at this time—come to watch the soldiers?" I asked him.

"Oh, no, miss. I was just about seeing whether there mightn't be one or two cart-loads of gravel by the hedge there where they have been digging. I thought I might be able to get them to let me have it cheap, and it would do nicely to mend those holes in your auntie's garden path where the drippings have come from the rain off the porch roof; and then I went into the house here, so as to get a bit of shelter for lighting a pipe—too much breeze outside."

Somehow I couldn't help feeling at the time that there was something very queer about Penny that afternoon. To begin with, talking about "a breeze" when it was so still and frosty that one could hear the chinking of the R.E.'s forge and the sawing of some planks in their workshops simply miles away!

And, for the second thing, old Penny never has smoked for as long as I can remember. Mr. Lascelles's cigarettes were the first whiff of tobacco smoke that have profaned Aunt Victoria's curtains since the year Eighteen Hundred and Goodness Knows.

So how could our old Penny have imagined that he was going to light a pipe?

And I said to him: "You had better not let the 'Super-Filberts' catch you poking round their fortified house, Penny! They might arrest you on suspicion of being a German spy!" I was just joking, of course, to keep his spirits up. And, anyhow, the poor dear old fellow did smile at last. He said to me: "Bless your heart, my dear Miss Elizabeth! There ain't no soldiers going to think anything of that sort about an honest old man like me! They all know where I work, and all about me. They are civil to me, and no mistake."

And he went hobbling off, rheumatism and all.

I didn't want to go back home again so soon, as you can imagine. What I wanted was to put off as long as possible seeing again that Lonely-Subaltern-impersonating disgrace to the New Army, Mr. Lascelles.

So, instead of going straight down the road again, I turned down a lane that is rather a long way round, by the oyster beds.

It is a narrow lane, always muddy unless we have frost, when the ruts are as hard as very deep corrugated iron. There is a wood on each side.

I say, you must really excuse some more landscape just here, will you? because it really is part of the story. I have just got to put in those woods, because it was they that made the lane so very dark. The tall hollies on either side of it branch out overhead and turn it into a regular tunnel.

So that was how it happened that two figures ahead of me, strolling along, I hardly saw until I was right up to them.

And they didn't see me at all, being too fearfully absorbed in what they were saying to each other.

They were a tall girl and a young man in uniform—an officer.

Oh, of course, we have plenty of officers down here. Some of them have their wives and things down for the week-end, too.

So, though the man had got a massive-looking khaki arm about the girl's waist, and though she was leaning her head in that "loppy," helpless sort of way against his shoulder that I suppose must mean she's fearfully in love, I shouldn't have taken any notice of this pair if I hadn't heard the man's voice.

It was a voice I knew. It was the voice of that big, good-looking Captain Masters: you know, the forget-me-notty one who came to our party, with the black hair like pitch, with a crinkle in it.

And it—the voice, of course—was saying, just as I passed, these startling words:

"But look here, darling: look here, Nancy——"

I gave one startled glance, through the dusk, at the figure of the girl.

Yes, it was. There are only three girls, only three of us in this village who would look as tall as that standing by the side of a six-foot-fourer like Captain Masters.

It was my own sister Nancy! With the young man that I thought she hadn't even seen since the party, since she was out when he came to pay his duty-call! How—what——

Well, of course, there was only one thing to be done, and that was to pass on as quickly as I could, pretending that I hadn't seen them. (They really hadn't seen me.)

I have my faults, goodness knows! Hot-tempered I may be. Vulgar and outspoken, Evelyn says I am, very often. And it is not for nothing that I have been nicknamed "Rattle." I suppose I do really talk rather a lot?

But no one shall ever say that I am not a sports-woman!

So I didn't breathe a word to Evelyn, when I got home this evening, of the terrific surprise I had been just given by our fair young sister! However, I didn't see why I shouldn't tax Nancy with it later on. So, after tea (where Mr. Lascelles never turned up) I took her aside, and said I had simply got to speak to her. I dragged her into the linen-room, which is a funny little warm, lavender-scented cubbyhole two steps down from the garret, where our poor old Penny, the gardener, has been put for the benefit of his rheumatism.

"I say, you are greedy," I said to her as a start off.

"Greedy?" said Nancy, opening her enormous innocent-looking blue eyes at me. "Do you mean because I have finished all those chocolates of Mr. Lascelles's? You know Evelyn had a box of her own, and you never will touch any sweets that unfortunate young man brings into the house, so——"

"Nothing about chocolates," I said, cutting it short. "But what about a girl who in the same week allows one young man to kiss her, and another to get on 'darling' terms with her?"

For a moment Nancy didn't say a single word. By the light of the tiny blue fairy light in the linen-room I saw that she had got the family blush well on!

There really are drawbacks to being the possessors of these dazzling fair skins like all of the Verdeleys have got.

Then she drew a long breath and said in a resigned little voice: "I suppose you mean ... just before tea?"

I nodded. "The—er—the second Prince Charming is a good deal better-looking than the first one," I told her. "That I will say for you."

"But—but, Rattle," began Nancy, in a half-horror-struck, half-puzzled tone, "how could you—how did you know?"

"Passed you just now in the lane when you were too wrapped up in your flirtation to see who was walking up behind you."

"Flirtation?" cried Nancy, quite sharply. "It isn't any flirtation!"

"What? What?" I put in, thrilled. "D'you mean it's what they call in books The Real Thing?"

"Rather," said Nancy, as if she meant it from the bottom of her heart, and then she pulled up as if she'd said what she wasn't going to.

I clutched her nice plump arm, "Nancy! Are you really very in love with him, and him with you?"

"Don't! Please don't ask me any questions!"

"You're engaged to him, then?"

"No!" said Nancy, in an uncertain sort of voice.

"What? Not engaged to him," I said, angrily. "Oh! If he's just a philanderer, like they have on the stage——"

"He—he's nothing of the kind——"

"If he is, and he's just passing the time away by making love to the prettiest girl here, and then going to ride away leaving her to break her heart——"

"But he isn't: he isn't. Rather not! Oh, my dear child, I can't explain," Nancy said, half laughing, half crying. "I assure you it's all right!"

"That means that you are engaged."

"I never said so," murmured Nancy, dimpling.

"I don't care what you 'say.' I suppose you call it 'an understanding.' A girl at school's sister had one of those for six months once, and it meant that nobody could go into the drawing-room when she was there with the young man and that she never looked at anybody else and that they got married in the usual way: so what the difference is," I said, "I can't see!"

"Perhaps not. Only, Rattle, you will be a brick, won't you?" she said very coaxingly. "You will prrrromise you won't breathe a word of——"

"You needn't have asked me that," I said, hurt. "Awful I may be. But at least I'm not a sneak."

"Oh, I know, I know! Only you might forget, and rag me before Evelyn, and Evelyn would be—— You know what Evelyn would be like!"

I nodded. "A conscientious objector."

Then I thought of something. Just as Nancy was going to slip away, I caught her arm again.

"You might tell me just one thing."

"No, Rattle, no. I'm not going to answer any questions. I can't now. 'Tisn't fair."

"It is! It's nothing to do with your—with him. It can't make any difference if you tell me just this.

"What, then?"

"This. I may be the youngest of the family, and too young and ignorant to know anything at all," I began (meaning it sarcastically, of course), "but I can guess some things. I can see from your face——"

Here Nancy turned her pretty face away.

"I could see from your face," I persisted, "that what's happened means something absolutely wonderful to you."

She gave my hand a little squeeze, "You darling Baby! You'll know yourself, some day——"

"Yes, but what I want to know now is, doesn't it make you sorry that you let Mr. Curtis kiss you at the party?"

She stared at me. "Sorry? What's it got to do with it? Why should I be sorry?"

"You don't feel," I asked, "that you've wasted something that ought to have been saved up for—for the real love affair?"

Nancy laughed like anything. "My dear Rattle! My dear Kid!"

"Thanks: a year younger than you, aren't I?"

"Yes, but—oh, as if that had anything whatsoever to do with this!" cried Nancy, still laughing. "Oh, what a lot of mistakes there must be made in this world by people making up their minds to believe there's only one kind of kiss!"

And then she ran downstairs, leaving me to ponder over the doings of a very crowded day.

CHAPTER X

THE ZEPPELIN NIGHT

When I said it had been "a crowded day" I only meant at the time crowded with the little affairs of the Verdeley family. My finding out first of all about that unforgivable Incubus and his "Lonely Subaltern" trick and our quarrel for one thing! And, for the other thing, my coming unexpectedly upon Nancy's romance. For it is a romance. How they have managed it in such a short time I don't know. But here she is actually engaged. Ahem! I mean, of course, having an understanding with this Captain Masters, whose name we hadn't heard a fortnight ago.

Really it reminds me of that old poem:

"A roving eye, a soldier's mien,
    A doublet of the blue,
No more of me you knew, my love—
    No more of me you knew."

In this case, of course, the doublet is made of what the London Mail tells you is the only key to a woman's heart—khaki!

How I should like to know every detail about just how it all happened! I must get Nancy to tell me every atom of that as soon as the "understanding" has blossomed out into a proper engagement.

Yes, here's Nancy, if you please, only just twenty and flying straight in the face of our parents' will that sent us down to this God-forsaken place on purpose so that we mightn't rush into the madness of an early love affair before the age of twenty-five!

What would our parents have said to this?

However, those two bombshells are not the only ones that have fallen on this place to-night. Between eleven o'clock and half-past we had, by way of a little change, some real ones!

An air raid over Mud Flats! That is the latest!

I heard the sound of "bang, bang, bang!" outside when I was in bed. Immediately I popped up and slipped on my dressing-gown and nipped across the passage to Evelyn's room, which looks out on to the front. Nancy was there already. Then out bounced Aunt Victoria in a million shawls and an eider-down and a most worried look, and her grey hair like a bird's nest with hoar frost on it. All this time "bang, bang, bang," was still going on outside, with a deep "Brrr—Rroum! Brrr—Roum!" that we seemed to hear in our bones, first of all. We were told afterwards that these were the guns from the cruiser in the Bay outside Mud Flats.

And then we heard a tap at Evelyn's door, which we'd left open.

And then, looking up, we beheld the weirdest little figure in bright-blue-and-cream-striped pyjamas, with red hair standing bolt upright on end, like a baby's just rumpled from its cot.

"Don't be frightened! I say, it's quite all right," said a voice that I suppose was intended to be awfully encouraging and dauntless, though, as a matter of fact, all of us girls were far more excited than frightened.

"The thing's gone over now! And, anyhow, you have got a man in the house." This was, if you please, our awful Incubus—the Lascelles boy!

I suppose he was the only object in pyjamas that Aunt Victoria had ever seen in her life (since I know she said that our uncle Edward always used to wear a good old-fashioned nightshirt). So possibly she thought that Mr. Lascelles had gone into mufti and was wearing the very latest and "nuttiest" thing in lounge suits. (She really is as ignorant as that about men!) What I mean to say is that she didn't look in the least shocked: she who always used to consider it a sign of being extra nice to be shocked at everything but an overcoat! Isn't it funny? And it was actually she, if you please, who suggested that we should all have cups of cocoa and pieces of cake to help us to "compose ourselves" before we went off to sleep again: not only that, but that she meant Mr. Lascelles as well, of course! So there he stayed, looking something like an illustration of "Toy-Town" in The Sketch, and bustling about in that zebra pyjama-suit, and that hair, handing cups and gobbling cake, and jabbering away to all of us—I mean, of course, to all of them.

Neither of us has spoken a word to the other since that echoing moment when I slapped his face for him in the dining-room, and I don't see any particular reason why we ever should speak again.

I am not going to apologise for having lost my temper with him: he deserved everything he got—and I don't suppose he is going to apologise for his "Lonely Subaltern" trick—so there we shall remain.

I forgot to say that, of course, both the servants were crowded in as well to that Zeppelin cocoa party in Evelyn's room. Mary, the housemaid, was the only one of our party who seemed at all hysterical. She came in Hinde's curlers and pink flannelette. She began to whimper about this being the end of everything, and how we had all come to the last hour of our lives.

This was when cook, in a grey golf-cape and carpet slippers, rounded on her, and said: "Well, if it is the last hour, it has come at a very good time for you, and don't forget it! Wasn't it your evening out? Didn't I see you, with my own eyes, trapesing down the market place with Lance-Corporal Gateshead going to the pictures?"

(I forgot to explain that, among other changes, there actually is a Picture Palace at Mud Flats now, for the benefit of the soldiers.)

"And even if you do get killed by them Germans to-night, at least you saw the new film of Charlie Chaplin the last thing before leaving! So I don't see what you have got to complain of, you ungrateful thing!" said cook. "If you was like poor old Mr. Penny, now, who had that bad attack of screwmatics for his last evening——"

That suddenly reminded us of poor old Penny—the only member of the entire household who wasn't gathered there in Evelyn's little room.

"I wonder if he has slept through all this racket?" said Aunt Victoria, rather anxiously. "If not, I am afraid he must have been rather terrified, poor old man."

"Penny? Is that your old gardener chap with the wig—the one who is always nosing round the camps for leaf-mould and groundsel for your canary, and that sort of thing?" said the Incubus quickly. "Sleeps in the attic, does he? Well, I will just pop up to him."

And off he popped in his red Turkish slippers.

We heard voices from Penny's room, Penny's sounding rather angry.

Presently the Sight in pyjamas came down, and said: "He's all right. He wasn't frightened a bit, unless he is scared by my language!"

"Language!"—just fancy, to dear old Penny, our faithful old servant! In the middle of a Zeppelin Night! Did you ever hear anything so disgraceful?

I think even the Incubus noticed my look of stony disapproval, for he went on rather hastily to explain: "I told the old Johnnie he'd simply got to keep his skylight covered. He'd lighted his lamp, just to hearten himself up, he said——"

Poor old fellow! As if he knew what he was doing in his nervousness and flurry!

—"But there was light enough to see beyond the Martello Tower. I don't think it will happen again," wound up that interfering parrot of an Incubus. "Good-night, everybody!"

Everybody said "Good-night," except me. I hope he noticed that I didn't even look at him. When I got back to my own room and went straight to the glass to see whether I had been looking as dignified and mature as I'd been feeling, I was annoyed when I saw myself. What with my two fat golden plaits hanging down on each side of my face and the soft muslin collar on my sky-blue dressing-gown and the pale pink ribbon showing from my nightie, I looked years and years less than my real age. I might have been fifteen-and-a-half!

Girls? Can you imagine anything more maddening?

CHAPTER XI

THE MAKING OF A MAN-HATER

Great excitement this morning in Mud Flats: assessing the damage that has been done by the Raid! And, after all, that's not much.

Most of the bombs had fallen into a soft mud bank off the Hard. One had been dropped near the doctor's back-door and had killed a fowl. Two—I mean two bombs, not fowls—had just missed the Martello Tower and the magazine that holds explosives for the Instruction Class.

"Bit of a bust-up if they'd got that!" I heard the Incubus saying to Evelyn at breakfast. "Might have consoled them for not having killed a single kiddy this time. But perhaps they know the youngest inhabitant in Mud Flats is nearly seventeen——"

Did he mean me? DID he? He was quite horrid enough to.

"Dear me, Mr. Lascelles, how could the Germans know that?" put in the drowsy voice of our Aunt Victoria from behind the new coffee-machine. "They can't have any spies here. Not here in the village."

He laughed and said: "Oh, no spies in Mud Flats. Oh, decidedly not—what?"

And then laughed again—silly idiot! It's just one of his thoughtless habits, since, of course, there was absolutely nothing to laugh at. However, never mind about the Lascelles boy. I've got something much more interesting to think about now.

You see, I can't help feeling frightfully excited and inquisitive about Nancy's affair with Captain Masters. She has not said a word about it to me ever since the Zeppelin night, and I haven't asked, only I can't help knowing that she is absolutely at the high tide of a happy engagement. It seems to me to shine all out of her: out of her blue eyes, out of every single crinkly curl of her golden hair: she seems to bring a wave of it with her into the house when she comes in from those errands to the village which always take her such an unconscionable time. I suppose because she always comes back by the shady lane? The whole atmosphere of the Grange is seething with it. Perhaps it is only because I have the key to this affair that I feel it is too strange that nobody else should guess anything about it. Yet nobody does suspect. Aunt Victoria goes on knitting as usual. Evelyn goes on doing the usual things, bandaging-class, sewing, and practising. The Incubus comes and goes in his awful boots. Mr. Curtis has been to call several times. Nobody seems to think of there being any understanding between our Nancy and the best-looking officer in Mud Flats!

But I do so wish that, instead of just bubbling over with silent happiness and smiles, Nancy would tell me something. If she would only enter into one single detail about it! Really it would be an act of charity to her youngest sister. For, beyond that, I don't seem to have anything in the wide world to interest me now.

Both my sisters are so altered: lost to me. Evelyn because, ever since the night of the party, she has taken such a fit of virtuousness and conscientiousness that we can hardly talk about anything without her being shocked. And Nancy because she is in the middle of the throes of first love and a secret engagement! As for me, among all the coming and going of soldiers and sailors in this place, I don't seem to have a single "special" that I want to be interested in me, or that I can possibly be interested in. I tell you what I think is the matter with me. I think I am utterly disillusioned—disillusioned at eighteen! I am absolutely "off" men. I don't think that I shall ever, as long as I live, be able to like one. Seriously, I mean it. Of course, you can guess whose fault that is: this horrible little Mr. Lascelles! The fact is, living in the house with some one whom one so thoroughly dislikes is enough to sour one's temper and warp one's whole nature for ever! The last straw to it, of course, was when he robbed me of the new interest that I was beginning to feel in my life, my "Lonely Subaltern." Yes, indeed! when my pet aversion turned out to be the same person as my unknown friend, that really did send all the "fair dreams crashing down to ruin," as it says in books.

I don't think any one can blame me for being a bit of a man-hater, after all?

* * * * * * * *

(Later.)

Nancy actually has vouchsafed a word to me at last! Not that it is much. She came into the drawing-room just now with a very woebegone face and asked everybody in general whether they had any toothache cure in the house. This was a bit of a surprise. You see, the one advantage of belonging to the Verdeley family is that the curse of toothache never has been known to them, from the cradle to the grave!

Our teeth all "come easily" when we are babies and teething. And when we get the second set they jolly well stay with us until the end of our lives. Even Aunt Victoria, who is twice a Verdeley, having married her cousin, even Aunt Victoria hasn't got a single gold crown or stopped tooth or atrocity of that kind in her head!

And father was the same. And we have all inherited it from him, thank goodness! So that I don't wish to boast, but we can't help realising that the combined teeth of the Verdeley girls are like nothing in the world but a long, completely-perfect string of white pearls. Hence the surprise when Nancy, with the corners of her mouth drawn well down, and her hand over one very pink cheek, murmured disconsolately that "she had such a racking toothache, and she wondered if anybody in the house had got any Nerve-Soother?"

Nobody had, of course.

Then Mr. Lascelles said he would nip off to the chemist's for a bottle.

As usual, on these occasions when you want to buy something in a hurry, it was Early Closing Day. The only chemist had gone off to Nowhere Junction. So then he (the Inc.) had to clatter away on his motor-cycle to Mr. Curtis's billet, at the other end of the town. Finally, he raised a small bottle of chlorodyne. This I took up to Nancy's bedroom, where she was lying stretched on a couch of pain with her thick emerald-green blanket-coat spread over her—(I told you she had given her pink eiderdown to the Incubus)—and Evelyn, hovering over her, was saying, "I'm afraid you'll have to make up your mind to go to the dentist's," and offering Nancy a bottle of "Eau de Cologne" and some cotton-wool, which she was faintly refusing.

"This will be better," I said, producing the chlorodyne. "It comes 'with Mr. Curtis's profoundest sympathy.'"

The mere mention of Mr. Curtis sent Evelyn out of the room. You know, she disapproves of him so awfully since the night of the party.

"Try and stick some of this into your tooth, old thing," I said consolingly. "Is it very bad? Open your mouth, and let me see which one it is."

"Oh, it's right at the back," moaned Nancy, touching her cheek.

"Why, that's the other side of your face from what it was this afternoon," I said.

"Yes, I think it must be a kind of neuralgia: it flies all over the place," said my sister, in a stifled voice. "Evelyn is quite right. She thinks the only thing to be done is for me to go to the dentist and see where the trouble really is."

"But if it's neuralgia," I said, "going to the dentist won't do it any good."

"Oh, yes, I am sure it will," said Nancy hastily. "I think going to the dentist will be absolutely the only thing to do. I expect there's a tooth at the bottom of it, really."

In fact, she seemed as anxious to go there as most people are to stop away. A thought came to me.

"Young Nancy," I said firmly, "open your mouth and let me have a look at those teeth of yours."

"No," objected Nancy. "You're not a dentist, Rattle. You wouldn't be able to do any good."

"All right, then I'll go away," I said, and moved to the door.

Nancy glanced at me. I think she saw it was no good pretending any longer.

"Open your mouth," I insisted.

Well, she opened her pink mouth, wide. I gave a peep in. And, of course, every one of her thirty-two teeth was as white and sound and efficient-looking as those of a young terrier!

"Oh, you fraud!" I said, looking her full in the face.

Nancy pursed up her mouth again, and a whole swarm of dimples immediately broke out over her face.

Then she said, meekly, "But, Rattle, dear, I have got to get to the dentist's somehow."

"You mean that somehow you have got to fib your way to Nowhere Junction," I said severely, "so that you have a chance of meeting Captain——"

"S-sh," said Nancy.

"I won't s-sh," I said. "You know you are only making an opportunity to meet your fiancé!"

"Oh, Rattle, darling, don't shout so loud," Nancy said softly, although as it happened I was only talking in a whisper. "If you ever were fond of me do stand by me now."

I leaned over her and hugged her through the blanket-coat.

"Of course, I am fond of you. You know you're my favourite person in the world. But I think you might let me know what I am standing by, and what I am supposed to do."

"Only see me through this! See that I manage to get up to Nowhere Junction to-morrow," said Nancy beseechingly. "You know that Aunt Victoria won't let one of us go there alone, and that Auntie won't go herself in this weather, because the frost is so bad for her bronchitis, so one of you will have to go with me, and I think it had better be you."

"Yes," I agreed. "I think it had better not be Evelyn. She wouldn't think it right. She would be shocked. We won't tell her."

You know it is curious, but as soon as people begin being "shocked" at things, like Evelyn, other people begin to leave off telling them anything. So, quite soon, they don't have much left to be shocked at. This is what's called the wind being tempered to the shorn lamb, I expect. But to go back to the plans of my other sister. Nancy said: "The trains to-morrow are very inconvenient for——"

She paused.

"For the dentist, I suppose."

"Yes, for the dentist," said Nancy, with more dimples. "So I shan't be able to go over by train."

"How then?" I asked, looking down at her.

"I shall go in the side-car of—of somebody's motor bicycle," planned that disgraceful Nancy, as demurely as you please. "He is going to offer (very kindly) to run me over to town."

"Well, then, he can't take me," I objected. "There is only room for one in that side-car of his."

"You will have to go in another side-car of another bicycle," decreed Nancy. "That has been arranged, too."

"Who's going to take me, then?" I asked (with what you might call a not unnatural curiosity), "Mr. Curtis?"

"No," said Nancy. Then she added, rather hurriedly, "Mr. Lascelles says he will take you."

Immediately I stiffened all over myself, as if I had swallowed six pokers.

"Oh, does he?" I said indignantly. "Mr. Lascelles says he will take me? Does he? That's kind of him! Well, as a matter of fact, Mr. Lascelles will not take me. There are a few things which I draw the line at. This is one. I am not going with Mr. Lascelles."

"Rattle! Be an angel!"

"I will be anything you like," I said, "but not with Mr. Lascelles. I will do anything for you, but I won't have anything to do with him! I am fright' fully sorry to disappoint you, Nancy, old girl, but don't ask me any more, because if it is a case of Mr. Lascelles I will not!"

And I meant what I said: every syllable of it. I meant to stick to it. But!——

Well, you know the kind of argument that begins by one's being absolutely determined about something, and saying that whatever happens one will not, one will not give in. It generally ends in the same way. The most determined of the arguers gets the worst of it. The one who simply looked pathetic and allowed big tears to well up into her blue eyes comes off triumphant. This was what happened in the wrangle between Nancy and me.

"You couldn't be so absolutely horrid to your own sister," Nancy almost wept, "if you only knew how much it meant to me being able to get up to Nowhere Junction to-morrow without any bother and asking of questions! And you know that he—that people will probably be off to the Front in a fortnight!"

(By "people" of course she meant Captain Masters.) "And I may never be going to see him again," she mourned. "Oh! Rattle, think of that! ... If you were a little older you might understand how I feel about this. But really I think there is no one so callous and unfeeling about things as the very young," said Nancy, who is only just twenty herself, dash it all!

She said, "If I could only get you to go up with me to-morrow——"

I said, "I don't mind going. 'Tisn't that. It's only who I've got to go with! I don't mind coming with you, and disappearing into one tea-shop while you go into another, in the way that a really good chaperon ought to do, and then joining you about half a mile from home again when you come back! Only, my young friend, you will have to arrange so that I go in somebody else's side-car."

"My dear, there is nobody else with a side-car!"

"But half the officers here have got them," I protested.

"Yes, but there is not another of the officers here that I would like to know about Harry—I mean about—you know who—and myself," said Nancy, getting agitated about it again. "You know that Mr. Lascelles is a pal of his, a very old chum, and Captain Masters knows that he can trust him to the uttermost——"

"That shows that he doesn't really know the Incubus's true character," said I, bitterly thinking of my own disillusionment about the "Lonely Subaltern."

"I don't see how you can pretend to know poor Mr. Lascelles," said Nancy to me quite indignantly. "You hardly speak to him! You won't look at him! And it is such a pity, Rattle, you know, because——"

"Well, because what?"

"Because he likes you so awfully much," said Nancy.

I laughed cynically, as it says in books. "Thank you," I said, "but I happen to know what the Incubus thinks of me!"

I remembered the icicles in his eyes the other day, just after I had slapped his face. (However, Nancy could not be expected to know anything about that.) She went on, sitting up on the bed and clutching her blanket-coat round her, for you know how piercingly cold it gets up in a bedroom this weather? She said, "Rattle, you don't know what he thinks, and, as a matter of fact, I do, since—well, since I've known one of the soldier men here pretty well. Because I hear a good deal about what all the others say. And they all say the same thing, Rattle. They say that Frank Lascelles is most frightfully fond of you."

This absolute rot annoyed me so much that I skipped up off the bed where I was sitting at Nancy's feet and was just going to bolt out of the room and not take the slightest notice of anything further that she said. However, Nancy grasped me firmly by the arm.

"Stop! you must listen," she said. "It's too bad that you are being so horrid to him. All the boys, my Harry, and Mr. Curtis, and the adjutant, say exactly the same thing—poor old Frank has been absolutely 'pottie' about the youngest of the girls at his billet ever since he first came here, and—— No! stop, Rattle! You are to hear it! They say, some of them say, that you must like him quite a lot, for it's always a sign of a girl's taking a really violent interest in a young man when she won't have anything to say to him in that very marked manner!"

"Oh!" I said, bouncing up and down on the bed in my annoyance. "How dare they say anything so absolutely idiotic? If they only knew me at all they would realise that nothing could possibly be further from my—why!—— You know——"

"Yes, I know, Rattle," said Nancy. "But, you see, they don't. What they think is that you don't know whether Mr. Lascelles is merely a flirt or not!"

"As if I cared what he is!"

"They think," pursued Nancy, "that you are just keeping out of his way because you are afraid of getting too fond of him!"

"Me, afraid of that?" I said, rocking with indignant laughter. "Oh, is that what they think?"

"So I understand, my dear!"

"Very well, then, I will see that they do understand," I cried indignantly. "I shan't care tuppence how much I am with that horrid little blot on the landscape. I will go and positively live in his pocket for the next week! I shan't like it, nor will he. But never mind. Anything to put a stop to this maudlin, puerile gossip of those young men," I said as witheringly as I could.

"Never mind about his pocket, Rattle," Nancy took up in her most coaxing tone again, "but if you will only go in his side-car——"

"Very well—I just will," I said, with the calmness of desperation, "if you like!"

So that was how that was settled!

What a day it will be——

There's one thing that I can have a quiet mind about though, at all events.

Nobody can accuse me of "using a side-car for pleasure."

"Pleasure!"

Ha, ha!

CHAPTER XII

THE ANYTHING-BUT-JOY RIDE

To begin with, I thought that our chaperon, our respected guardian, who is supposed to be so frightfully particular about us, I thought she would be a difficulty.

But, do you know, a change has come over our Aunt Victoria? It is not the first time I have noticed it, either, since the troops have been here at Mud Flats. What with constantly entertaining masculine men in this house, and knitting khaki silk ties for the Incubus, and having coffee and bacon for breakfast, and getting champagne out of the cellar for that party—well, I don't recognise Auntie: I honour bright don't. It sometimes seems to me as if she were thoroughly disorganised. And it has been a great shock to me, I can tell you!

All this is to show you how paralysed with surprise I was to find that Aunt Victoria seemed to think absolutely nothing of Nancy's proposed expedition.

She said: "Yes, dear. Toothache must be a terrible thing. And it is far better to have the tooth out at once, and have done with it. And I am sure it is very kind of Captain Masters to run you up to the Junction——"

Imagine it! She went on:

"Yes, and you want Rattle to go with you, I expect, to hold your hand? Did you say that Mr. Lascelles said he would take her? That will be nice. What time are you going to start?"

So that was that.

As for the time when we did start, it was about eleven. Nancy, for reasons best known to herself, had decided upon eleven o'clock in the morning. Goodness knows how the two young officers managed to explain things to their C.O. or whoever it is: whether they fibbed, or told the truth, or got sick-leave, or a funeral, or an operation for appendicitis, I suppose I shall never hear. Anyhow, they'd what they called wrangled it.

So at ten minutes to eleven there we both were, waiting at the door of the Moated Grange. Both of us wore our little brown leather hats and our big emerald-green belted blanket-coats, which we had all three got alike. Of course, Nancy, the little scoundrel, had taken care to have her face well wrapped up in a big white woolly Shetland shawl to keep the draught from getting into that poor aching tooth of hers!

Mr. Lascelles had already wheeled up what he calls his "bus" and stood by it, waiting, all wrapped up and interned in that hideous belted waterproof garment, with a rug-strap about the waist of it, and the cap and the goggles, and that general get-up of a motor-cyclist that makes a man look a cross between a navvy and a diver.

When Nancy was being helped to her seat by Captain Masters, and was having about six extra rugs brought out for her by Evelyn (who really is the sweetest thing when anybody is in pain or trouble), and Aunt Victoria was impressing upon the poor sufferer to mind and not take cold in the empty place when the tooth came out, and while cook was also telling her that she would have some nice camomile tea warmed up for her when she got home—when all this quite unnecessary fuss was going on over "poor darling Nancy," the Incubus turned to me. He had brought a big scarlet rug lined with fur, and this he began, rather gingerly, to tuck about me.

I had to let him, of course. I was supposed to be in his charge, just as Nancy was in Captain Masters's. How perfectly awful! What a completely-against-the-grain sort of day it was going to be! Little Me making a sisterly sacrifice of herself for that naughty Nancy's sake—and thrown for hours, probably, into the hated society of the Incubus!

Oh, how I was going to enjoy myself! I saw it all coming.

(At least, I thought I did.

Little knowing how much more there was going to be than I had bargained for!)

Just before we started the Incubus actually did speak to me. It was the first time that he'd done this since that startling moment when I had slapped his face so hard in the dining-room.

"Quite sure you'll be warm enough, Miss Elizabeth?" he said.

And he spoke in a polite, not-quite-sure sort of voice, as if he thought probably when I spoke I should snap his head off.

I nearly did, too.

I felt fearfully inclined to speak very curtly to him.

Then I changed my mind again.

Captain Masters, looking a perfect dream in his coat and cap, but as if butter wouldn't melt in his handsome mouth, was standing close by. Quite suddenly I remembered what Nancy had told me about what Captain Masters had said the other men had thought about me and Mr. Frank Lascelles.

They actually thought that my being horrid to him meant that absurd thing, did they?—that it was all put on! Idiots! And possibly Captain Masters, the whited sepulchre, was waiting now to hear Mr. Lascelles get a snub from the youngest of the girls at his billet—a snub that he and all the rest of those idiotic young soldiers would go and interpret in exactly the opposite way!

Very well—all right, then he just shouldn't hear that.

So I turned round and said in the friendliest tone of voice that the Incubus had ever yet heard from me, "Oh, yes, thank you very much: I shall be beautifully warm under the nice red rug."

Well, anyhow, even if that tone of voice was no surprise to Captain Masters (who I don't believe heard it, he having his eyes simply glued to Nancy's every movement as if he were on a rifle-range and she were the target), it quite took aback the Incubus himself.

For he (the Incubus) opened his eyes and simply stared at me, and then, if you will believe it, he actually began to blush. What I could see of his face between the cap and collar had turned very nearly as red as that fur-lined rug that I nestled down into in the wicker carrier. Little dreaming, as I say, of the adventures I was destined to meet with before the day was over!

Well, in another minute we were off: Captain Masters and my sister clattering on ahead and the Incubus and I clattering a little way after them.

I found it awfully exhilarating. The fresh, frosty air shrieked in my ears and freshened my face and tried to find a loose lock of my hair to pull from under the little leather hat, but could not. I even enjoyed the rattle and the clatter and the speed. I quite forgot that my partner in this mad rush was not an amusing person, whom I would have liked, but my pet abomination himself! I forgot everything but the pleasure of the joy-ride itself—I couldn't help its turning out to be pleasure after all, could I?

I had heard them say that it was about three-quarters of an hour's run to the Junction, but I don't think we had been tearing along those roads between those long stretches of marshland for more than half an hour before the break-down occurred.

The rush got slower and slower, and finally petered out into dead standstill.

Don't ask me what had happened, because I really cannot tell you. It was more of that machinery, those things they have "gone wrong." There the machine stopped, and couldn't be got to go on again: although Mr. Lascelles nipped off and began fiddling with things and pulling at things and tugging at things, and saying, "What the—how the——" in a mutter to them. But "forrader" we did not get!