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!