CHAPTER VII

THE RESERVIST'S WIFE

While Rosamond Fayre, with recruiting-ribbons at her breast, had been surrounded by men on the sunlit Parade, Miss Eleanor Urquhart had been preparing for another Hen-party at Urquhart's Court.

Very different, this one, from the gay gathering of Club girls that had been scattered like a giantess' piece-box of many colours over the great green billiard-table of a lawn, that afternoon not many weeks ago!

For this party did not fill the whole lawn, but only a few garden benches that were set out under the lime-trees that had already shed a light carpet of dead leaves which would have been beheld with horror by Mr. Marrow--on a far corner of that lawn.

Eleanor, the chairwoman of that meeting, standing by a table that was put to face the rows of seated women, wore the "responsible"-looking grey costume that she had worn on the other occasion. Her friend, Miss Fabian, who, all pince-nez and superiority, was to address the meeting, wore under her cape of Art-green cloth with the collar of Vorticist embroidery, the same brown-patterned Liberty gown; but the dress of the Reservists' wives was soberer and in many cases shabbier than the pink and Saxe and sky-blue bravery that had adorned the party of Eleanor's Club girls. Those girls had chattered and giggled and shrieked aloud in the high tide of exuberant spirits, but there was little laughter or noise among these women. The Club girls had sung musical-comedy choruses, and had played kissing-games and had waltzed to the music of the blue-and-white uniformed band; but here was no singing, no dancing; and, in the now historic phrase, "_this was not the time to play games_." These wives of men who had rejoined their old regiments were of varying ages and varying classes, from a bonneted and shawled flower-seller to a retired lady's maid, in a hat and a black frock that had been made (originally) in Vienna; but upon the faces of nearly all of them there was to be seen the levelling look of strain, of responsibility. For at such a time "_women must weep_" is not the motto for such as they, but "_women must work_."

To find reasonably-paid work for each of these left-behinds was now Eleanor's care. In the large book before her on the table there was entered--in the pretty, clear handwriting that was so successfully modelled on the writing of her late secretary--a suggestion for employment opposite each name that she had just taken down.

"And now, before we all go into the dining-room for tea," she concluded, "my friend, Miss Octavia Fabian, will say a few words to us explaining why our country is at War, and what we hope the results of this War will be."

Miss Fabian rose, and the decorous silence in the ranks of the Reservists' wives became troubled by gusts of whispering here and there that made a background for the high-pitched, clear-cut tones of Miss Fabian's platform voice.

"Now, what I have to Explain to you wives of our soldiahs----"

"--Six of 'em, and always kept as any one could see them! When I took them to the Institute the Matron said, 'Well, if all the children we had brought here was as----'"

"Same battery as my old----"

"Rent? I says, whatever's '_rent_,' I should like to know----"

"Ah, she's one o' the lucky ones; never bin so well off in her life. He used to drink every penny she made, and now what's she got? Separation allowance and half-pay from his firm, if you please; bought herself a new 'at, new boots. All she's got to do now is walk out in 'em and get off again!"

"Order, please! Hush!" from Miss Urquhart.

Then, louder from the speaker in the green cape, "We intend that aft-ah this deplorable War, there can be No furth-ah War. We are fighting for that Great Aim. We are fighting (paradoxically enough!) for Disarmament! We are fighting so that our children and our children's children need Nev-ah know what fighting Is----"

"--soon as he read that piece in the _Mirrer_ about that charge of his old Rigiment he says to me, 'Good-bye, Annie,' he says, 'I'm off. Don't care if my time is up,' he says, 'I'm goin' to rejoin, if they'll 'ave me.' And o' course they----"

"Will you all p-p-please be quiet until Miss Fabian has finished," interposed the chairman once more. Then she turned, to find, waiting at her elbow, the tall young parlour-maid in blue with silver buttons, who had replaced Mr. Beeton the butler (now Petty Officer Beetles).

"What is it, White?" murmured her mistress. "I said----"

"If you please, Miss, a young--a young Person has just arrived who says she must see Miss Urquhart at once," whispered the parlour-maid, conveying all her scandalised disapproval of this intruder in one sedate glance. "I said you were engaged, Miss, but the--the Person said it was important and she must see you yourself, at once. She didn't give any name."

"Is she a Reservist's wife?" murmured Miss Urquhart; upon which the sedate White replied, "I shouldn't imagine so, Miss, but she has a little baby with her."

"Perhaps I'd better come," said Eleanor. With an apologetic glance at the back view of Miss Fabian's Art-green cape, she slipped away from the meeting under the limes, and walked across the lawn beside the parlour-maid.

"Where is she--in the Hall?"

"Oh no, Miss; she didn't want to come into the house, she said. And when she heard you'd got a meeting, she wouldn't come on to the Terrace. She said she wanted to speak to you by yourself, and she'd wait at the back. She gave the little baby to Mrs. Marrow to hold, Miss, and she went towards the kitchen-garden; walking up and down; I wondered if perhaps she weren't quite right in her head; she looked quite wild, somehow----"

"Poor thing, what can it be?" said Miss Urquhart wonderingly, and she sped towards the walled kitchen-garden at the back of the Court.

She opened the green door which pushed softly against the great dark cushion of the rosemary bush that grew beside the wall. The rest of that brick wall of mellow-red and yellow was a backing for great spreading fans of plum and apricot. Half a dozen forcing frames were ranged in between it and the thick box border that edged the path. And on the path, between those frames and the prickly ranks of the gooseberry bushes in the opposite bed, she beheld, striding away from the door, the buxom figure of a young woman clad in a skirt of large black-and-white check, and a belted frieze sports-coat of a most brilliant and arresting pink; the colour of the brightest rhododendron, the most garishly gay petunia. Her hands were thrust deep into the pockets of this garment; her head, in a lurid crimson casque of a hat, was held defiantly erect.

As the door opened to admit Miss Urquhart, the girl in the flaring pink coat wheeled round and turned her comely, excited face upon her.

"_Pansy_! It's _you_?" cried Eleanor astonished.

Then, as she came forward to meet the Principal Boy, that astounded look faded from Miss Urquhart's small face, leaving it disapproving beyond description; searching, hard.

For Pansy Vansittart was the very last visitor whom Eleanor had expected or wished to see, since enquiries that she had lately been making about her seemed likely to be true.

There was a cloud of the blackest suspicion over Pansy's good name.

A rumour of it had reached Urquhart's Court as long ago as the day of the Girls' Garden Party, when Miss Fabian had mentioned that friend of hers who collected rents, and who knew "_something to the discredit_" of Miss Urquhart's theatrical _protegée_.... That friend, who had been away, had returned and had furnished Miss Fabian with further particulars of what she knew. Miss Fabian had only to-day passed them on to the Head of the Girls' Holiday Hostel Club.

No wonder Miss Urquhart scarcely expected to see this girl before her, here!

In her austerest voice she began, "Well, Pansy. I am surprised. Have you anything to say to me----"

"I have, Miss Urquhart. I should think I had. Several things!" cut in the Principal Boy in her loudest and least abashed tone. She stood there, her feet in their showily-buckled shoes planted well apart on that path; her handsome head well up, her face pale beneath its inevitable powder, and her brown eyes ablaze with temper. "I want to know, for a start, if you aren't _ashamed_ of yourself?"

Eleanor, rooted to the spot beside the rosemary bush, was for a moment struck dumb by this unlooked-for opening. It was one which she thought might have been more suitably turned upon Miss Vansittart herself. But there was no trace of shame or even nervousness in that young woman's wrathful gaze as she glared down upon the Court's young mistress and, without waiting for any answer, went on with her indictment:

"Nosing and busybodying into my affairs, you've bin! Writing letters! Sending to my old address! Setting the landlady on to Mag about my concerns! It's not what any _lady_ would do, that's flat!"

Eleanor, with a very stiff backbone, interposed: "I think you are forgetting yourself----"

"What?" (Staccato.) "Me? Haw!" (Still more staccato.) "Tell me who started it--that's what I'd like to know. That's what I'd like to know! Who sent that little freak of an Autumn Daisy pokin' round my place and wantin' to know everything from the hot-water pipes down to what time everybody came in at night, the----"

She paused. No epithet to be found even in Pansy's vocabulary could have conveyed the withering scorn of that short pause.

She went on again. "I know who it was, as a matter of fact. Ho, yes! It was that Miss Four-eyes Fabian of yours! She's the one! _She's_ one o' those spiteful cats who's never happy unless she's raking up anything she can against any girl who happens to be good-looking; she hasn't got any chance of a young man of her own, no, and she'll see that nobody else has, too, without she can make things hot for her! Rakin' up and snuffin' out, the----"

Here another of those brief but pregnant pauses, while Eleanor, flushed and angry, would have spoken. Pansy's "Huh!" cut like a pistol-shot across any attempt at interruption. The warm quiet of that sunny garden fled; walls and bushes and frames and vegetable-beds seemed to ring, to echo again with the storming of that young woman with that voice, those garish garments.

"Taking away a girl's reputation. Thinks nothing o' that, she don't! ... A respectable girl! Girl that's always been being got at, as a matter of fact, for being so particular and strait-laced! Starting a pack of lies about her, and people jorin'----!"

"Do you mean that this is not true?" Eleanor slipped in hastily and edgeways. "This that Miss Fabian's friend----"

"There! A-_har_! Didn't I know it----"

"--that Miss Fabian's friend told me was known for a fact? She said that when she called at your rooms at that place in Brixton," persisted Miss Urquhart, "that she actually saw you, and that you did not deny----"

"'Course I didn't deny anything! Deny? What's the good of denying anything to a little flannel-face with a voice like an ungreased wheel that came pokin' round with her, 'Are you Miss Vansittart?' 'Guilty!' I said; and me that hadn't had time to get dressed, with me hair all down and my pink matinée on. 'Come in, do. This way! I'd better put you on the Free List,'" I said, and pretty satirically, too, _which_ she didn't take in. "'Have a good look round, old dear.' Which she did. Hoo! I couldn't help seein' the funny side," enlarged Pansy indignantly, "when me Aunt Geranium began putting her eyes on stalks to gape round my place at all Ma's furniture"--a gasp for breath here--"and the big gramophone in the corner and the siphons and the ash-trays" (gasp) "and my photographs of the other girls and the comedian in our Company and some of the little things drying on the fire-guard" (pant) "and _The London Mail_! It amused me!" declared Pansy with another angry hoot. "And when she said to me, 'I hear some of the tenants are complainin' because you never came in till midnight.'" (gasp). "'Midnight if I'm lucky,' I said. 'It's oftener one and two G.M.!' She said, 'Very unpleasant for a young woman to walk down this lonely new road alone, so late?' I said, 'Must be! I generally take good care to have a young man, to hang on to, with me!' And she" (gasp) "looked all ways for daylight and said, 'No, really. Do you really mean to admit that you return every night at those disgraceful hours and with a MAN?' and I" (gasp) "just said the nastiest thing I could think of."

Here Pansy, with another hoot, tossed her crimson casque and laughed into Eleanor's apprehensive little face as she concluded with that "nastiest thing" she had hurled at the rent (and scandal) collecting spinster.

"I said, 'Yes; _Miss!_'"

"W-w-w-well, then, I d-d-don't see how you can d-d-defend your conduct," took up Eleanor, with an energetic though stammering attempt to regain her legitimate footing. "And b-b-besides that, there is another thing. The m-m-maid told me j-just now that you b-b-brought a b-b-baby with you, and that the g-gardener's wife is minding it for you now. Is it your s-sister's child?"

"No fear!" retorted Pansy promptly. "Let my sister cart her own little handfuls about! It's mine, that is."

"Yours?" said Eleanor, with a deepening of the hardness on her face. "Then it was all true. You have got a baby----"

"Why shouldn't I?" snapped the Principal Boy.

"A baby----"

"Yes. Why not? Haven't I been married gettin' on for two years now----"

"Married?" echoed the stupefied Eleanor. "You're married?"

The breast of Pansy's petunia-pink frieze coat seemed to swell as a sail that takes the breeze. With another toss of her whole person she retorted, "You don't give me much chance, do you, Miss Urquhart? You don't take much for granted! As soon as you've made sure there's a kid, you--ah, you're as bad as the other one!" Her face, no longer pale, deepened in colour almost to the crimson of her hat. "If you don't believe me, Miss Urquhart, you'd better look at these----"

She plunged her hand into one of the hip-pockets of her coat, drew out a long packet of papers and thrust them upon the younger girl.

"Here's my marriage-lines, see? Read 'em," she commanded. "Yes, you read 'em; here you are. 'Pansy Teresa Price,' understand? That's me. Vansittart's only my stage name, as any o' the girls could have told you, if you'd agone about asking them in the right way," snorted the Principal Boy. "And here's my other name, Hawkins!" She stabbed the certificate with a nicotine-gilded forefinger. "Here he is: 'George Herbert Stanley Hawkins'--that's the 'young man' I used to come home with every night at those 'disgraceful hours'--yes, and stay home with, too. (More than some o' them do!) Think o' that! That's my Stanley! That's my husband! 'Cinematograph Operator'; that's his occupation. Was then, I mean. Want to know what his present shop is? What he's doin' now, Miss Urquhart? He"--with another proud heave of that petunia-pink bosom--"he's reelin' off another sort o' pictures"--with a brisk circular gesture--"of those heathen Germans! Yes. He's working a machine-gun somewhere in France at this minute, bless 'im! That's where he is; with his old battery that he served with in the Bor' War! That's right. Well! And so you'd a party for Reservists' Wives here to-day, Miss Urquhart. Pity you never thought to give me a call!"

"How w-w-was I to know that you were a Reservist's wife?" demanded the discomfited Eleanor, not unnaturally rather cross. "How c-c-could any one have thought you w-were a m-married woman?"

At this Pansy's temper, that seemed for the minute abating, suddenly flared up again. She kicked the path with the wooden Louis heel of her shoe as she exclaimed, "Not 'a married woman!' Me! A married woman, ah, and a good wife--_which is more than you'll ever be_, Miss Urquhart, for all those sparklers on your finger there, and for all this swanky house-and-grounds that you're getting married for!"

"There is no n-n-n-need," Eleanor began, set-faced, "to be insolent, Pansy."

"Insolent? Shall be insolent if I like--I shall say what I like to you for once, Miss Urquhart, and do you good," cried the Principal Boy, her bell-like tones shaking afresh with anger. "Don't think I don't see through you--a nice kind of sweetheart you'd make to any man--let alone the one who's the misfortune to be cast for the intended! I bet that's never been anything but a dead frost since the curtain went up on it! I bet he's never been encouraged to catch you in his arms and fairly _eat_ you up with kisses, same as a girl's got to expect when she's promised herself to a fellow!"

Here, Eleanor Urquhart, standing there small and undefensive, winced. She winced distinctly. She put out the spare brown hand that wore the Urquhart ring, and gave a little clutch, as if for support, to the rosemary bush beside her. She held on to a bunch of the sturdy twigs, thick with dark, aromatic leaves. Her other hand went to the breast of her grey jacket and she cleared her throat with a little choking sound that was rather pathetic. But she did not move the relentless Principal Boy. Pansy, who had lashed herself up into growing excitement, went on.

"Ah, you look down on me, Miss Urquhart. You think I'm 'not a lady,' but I tell you what it is--I know you're not a woman! Ah, and he knows it too, your Mr. Urquhart does. A pretty wash-out that'll be, you getting tied up to him! For"--Pansy wound up with a piece of tried feminine philosophy--"_if you can't keep a young man before you've got him, when can you, I should like to know?_"

Here Eleanor, still clutching the rosemary twigs, suddenly raised the dusky head which had dropped on to her slight chest. Blankly, incredulously, her dark eyes met the angry, taunting eyes of the woman of whom she'd thoroughly "got the back up."

"Pansy!" she exclaimed, "I d-don't understand. I w-w-want to know what you m-mean by what you've just said. 'Not k-keep him'?"

"Oh, you know you haven't! You know you haven't!" Pansy persisted, roused, angry, the worst in her nature awake and anxious to hurt the fellow-woman to whom she had always been subconsciously antagonistic. "Any one could see with half an eye who all his eyes were for! If I'd only seen him at the Party here, I should have been on to it, watching him follow her about like--why, like the limelight follows the leading lady round the stage in her big scene! You weren't on in that, Miss Urquhart! Let alone that time in France, at the Hostel----"

"What was that?" Eleanor, her eyes fixed on the Principal Boy, demanded, very sharply. "What was that at the Hostel?"

"Only the same thing--only more so. He was her shadow, was your handsome young man. He couldn't help himself!" enlarged the Principal Boy. "He was hers for a word, for a look----"

"Who d'you mean? Tell me. You must tell me," said Eleanor Urquhart, peremptorily, with a sharp, shrill note in her voice that sounded odd in her own ears. "I have a right to know."

"You're a fool if you don't know already," retorted the downright pantomime girl. "I mean her you left to look after us there; Miss Fayre. D'you suppose that good-looking young fellow wasn't head over ears in love at first sight with that peach of a girl?"

There was a silence in that sunny garden; through which floated from the house the deep and distant purr of the gong for tea. Then Eleanor, still with that odd new note in her voice, said, "This must be a mistake."

Pansy laughed unsympathetically.

"A mistake? Not of mine, Miss Urquhart. Why, you should have seen him! Every time he gave her a look, well, it might as well have been a arm round and have done with it! And didn't he let out to me himself that he'd been chasing round the rocks and everywhere that morning trying to find Miss Fayre? Didn't he get me to get the other girls out of the way that afternoon so that he should have the stage to himself to talk to her? Not that I heard a word after," the Principal Boy added, "turned him down proper, I shouldn't wonder. Got a best boy of her own, has our Miss Fayre, I expect. But if there wasn't any poaching on your preserves that week, it wasn't any credit to your young Mr. Ted!"

"Are you sure?" began Eleanor, a little gaspingly. "Pansy! Are you----"

But her small and agitated voice was interrupted by a volume of sound that came from beyond the closed green door of the garden; a noise as of a young and healthy bull-calf, bellowing.

The door behind Eleanor was pushed open and the noise increased almost deafeningly as there appeared the aproned, rosy and plump wife of Mr. Marrow the ex-gardener bearing in her arms a white-plush-coated child of eight months, his white woolly cap bristling with War-badges, his eyes tightly closed, and his mouth stretched to a cavern emitting roar after roar.

"Can't do anything with him," explained Mrs. Marrow in a shriek above the uproar, with an apologetic dip towards Miss Urquhart. "He woke up sudden, and I suppose finding hisself all among strangers, pore lamb, in a place he wasn't used to----"

"Oh, _lor_! Givvim to me, then. Come on, Herbert," exclaimed Mrs. Stanley Hawkins, grabbing her son, not too gently, into her petunia-pink embrace. "There! Tinker! Young Terror, ain't you? Leave _orf_----"

And, as if by magic, the bellowing ceased. With the vibrations of it still quivering in the air, with the tears still rolling down the rose-red and bulging cheeks, the Pantomime-girl's baby drew a long, sobbing breath and then grinned the ineffable grin of Naughtiness Triumphant.

"Ah," said the baby-boy. "M'--gur!"

The next thing to happen was as sudden and as unexpected as that lull to a tempest.

For Miss Eleanor Urquhart, moving rapidly as she was never known to move, took a hasty diffident step towards the group, gazed with a moved and transfigured face upon Master Herbert Hawkins, and cried aloud, "Oh, Pansy, what, _what_ a darling! ... Oh! You _sweet_! ... Can't I hold him for _just_ a minute?"

"Well, if he'll go to you----" returned the young Mother, taken aback and mollified; and Eleanor put out her hands, cooing invitation.

For a moment the child hesitated. Then the complacent grin creased his pink face once more, and he stretched out his little arms, stiff in the thick plush sleeves, towards the instinctively-recognised, the born Baby-worshipper.

And for the next few minutes those two wives saw Eleanor Urquhart absolutely at her best; holding and playing with a little child. For she was of the type of which the perfect nurse is made; and not the good-natured, capable Mrs. Marrow, not the sumptuous Pansy, not the beautiful Rosamond, beloved of men, well-fitted to be the mother of men, would ever learn quite that lovely gesture with which plain, severe little Eleanor cradled in her arms another woman's child.

"I didn't ought to have said off all I did say to you, Miss Urquhart, but I _was_ wild," admitted Pansy, ruefully, as she took leave at the garden-door of the little organiser whom she had never resented less. "It's not you; it's those _friends_ of yours I haven't been able to stick; if you don't mind me saying so; still, if there weren't some o' that sort, there'd be one sort less. And I've been to blame, myself. I know I didn't ought to have passed myself off as a single young girl and gone to that Hostel, but there! Nobody calls themselves 'Mrs.' in my profesh'; and I swear none of those other girls, Miss Urquhart, had a word of anything Married, as you might call it, from _me_. I----"

("OOgully-googully," said Pansy's baby-boy.)

"N-n-n-never mind, Pansy. You go and have some tea with Mrs. Marrow, will you?"

"It was all because I was weaning my little Herb!" the Principal Boy persisted. "He'd always slept in an old property-box in the dressing-room while I went on, Miss Urquhart, and I'd given him his feed at ten there, regular, every night. (More than lots of 'em would!) And I said, 'Well, if I've got to drop it, go away I _must_, and so----"

("Goo an' glue," said the baby.)

"It is all right," said Miss Urquhart, standing there with one finger still lingering in the baby-boy's pink clutch. "We'll forget about it now."

"There's something else I was gassing about," added the young Reservist's wife, uneasily, "that I didn't ought, and that I've p'raps got off all wrong, and that I hope you'll forget, too----'

"Very well, Pansy," said Miss Urquhart with her most business-like nod of farewell. "Good-bye, you _Duck_--" to the baby.

Pansy knew, as well as Eleanor knew herself, that what she had said about a _fiancé_ and about another girl was something not to be readily "forgotten" by a bride-to-be.

And Eleanor Urquhart, outwardly busied with the tea for the Meeting, thought of little else but that "something" for the rest of the afternoon--except of the slow passage of the time to the hour when Ted Urquhart had said he would be coming back, from his business in London, to The Court.

With a beating heart and a catch at her throat the girl who was to be married on the morrow decided, "I shall speak to him about it. I shall ask _him_."