CHAPTER XX

I PLAY PROVIDENCE

Well, I've always heard that when one is very upset oneself, the best cure is to force oneself to take an interest in somebody else's troubles.

Of course, I'm not exactly "upset" about Mr. Lascelles having been kidnapped out of this house before I could hear what he wanted. I'm sorry for him, that's all.

But I'm sorrier still for my poor crossed-in-love sister Evelyn.

I really must devote some attention to her and her rejected suitor.

It makes me perfectly miserable to see somebody I am fond of taking love as Evelyn takes it. Her smile is a most half-hearted affair, and she takes absolutely no interest in her food, though she eats pretty well. At dinner-time she tried to make a meal of vegetables and gravy and one grain of rice pudding; but immediately Aunt Victoria looked up and said: "Evelyn, my dear child, is that all you are going to have? Aren't you feeling well? What is the matter with you?"

Of course, it is the last thing that poor old Evelyn wants for anybody to think that there is anything the matter with her, so she had to pretend that she had got rather a headache again through the stuffiness of the room where they have their bandaging class, and that that was why she didn't feel like eating.

And then next day she took to roast mutton and two helpings again as if nothing had happened.

However, of course I knew that concealment was gnawing away like a worm in the bud, like that girl in Shakespeare, and that Evelyn was feeling as if all the champagne had gone out of her life, as I once heard Mr. Lascelles express it. We do so miss him and his expressions!

It is--really, it is too beastly to be in a house full of women once more.

It is nearly as bad as before the troops came to Mud Flats.

At least, now I suppose one can't very well say it is as bad as that, because, after all, we do have men coming and going. Our brother-in-law, Harry, is in and out quite a lot, and he brings various of the men with him to have tea and to play the piano in the Lair.

And then, of course, we have occasionally the evidently quite homeless Mr. Curtis. Evidently Evelyn cares as much for the creature as if he were every inch a soldier, and, goodness knows! there are plenty of inches of him to be!

So since that is her ideal I do think she ought to be allowed to have it instead of grizzling and moping about it all day and half the night, and to think that it's only her obstinate idealism or whatever she likes to call it that is standing in the way of her being perfectly happy with the creature forever! You see, he won't be having to go out to the front like Nancy's Harry, because he (Mr. Curtis) has got a permanent job as instructor here.

And I am sure Aunt Victoria could be got round, considering how surprisingly kind and sympathetic she was about Nancy's war marriage.

Evelyn really is like the old song, "If she dies an old maid she will have only herself to blame."

This afternoon I told her so in the Lair, where she was sitting looking like the absolute incarnation of The Pip. We had a long, fruitless, and exhausting argument about it, which I won't go into again, because it was just like the last one we had, which you read all about before the German spy night.

Arguments are like history, having a way of repeating themselves.

And this one had a sort of constant refrain from Evelyn of, "It is all very well, Rattle, but _you don't understand_. You might be able to go to Edwin--I mean Mr. Curtis--and say to him, 'Look here, I have thought better of it. I will marry you, I thought I minded too much about Nancy at the party, and all that sort of thing, but I don't. All that I mind would be not being able to be with you any more'--I couldn't do that, Rattle; you don't understand."

I got so very tired of what one can't help considering as a parrot cry!

It is no earthly use ever arguing, especially when you are the youngest.

And all you can say is, "Yes, I do understand," and then the other person says, "No, you don't, you can't," and there you are!

What can be done?

Nothing!

So I resigned myself, and merely said, "No, perhaps I _don't_ understand. Of course, I am the youngest, and, of course, I _haven't_ ever been in love, so, of course, I haven't any right to an opinion; but look here, Evelyn, can't you talk it over with somebody else, and see what they think about it?"

Evelyn, holding her face in both hands, said gloomily, "What sort of person is there that I could possibly talk it over with?"

"Well," I said, "somebody married, who knew all about love and that!"

"Aunt Victoria, I suppose you mean," said Evelyn, with bitter irony.

"No, of course, not Aunt Victoria," I said patiently. "But what about Nancy?"

Evelyn gave a little furious jump out of her chair.

"Nancy!" she exclaimed indignantly. "But Nancy is the one that all the trouble is about--Nancy is the very last person that I should ever breathe a word to!"

"Is she?" I said, staring at Evelyn across the good old ink-spattered tablecloth of the Lair. "Now, that's funny, because, if I had been you, Nancy would have been the very first person to whom I should have turned! Just because she was at the bottom of the trouble, as you call it. I call it a storm in a teacup and a mountain and a molehill," I said, getting mixed up rather in my metaphors because I was really serious.

I said: "If I were in your place, Evelyn, I should go straight away to Nancy and get her to tell me exactly what had happened that time on the staircase. I should say: 'Look here, I do so want to marry Edwin, but I don't feel I can unless I know exactly how much he liked you first. Do you think he would have asked you to marry him if you hadn't got engaged to Harry Masters? Do you think he is only making love to you because he is one of those young men who marry the family rather more than the girl? They get a type that they admire and they stick to it. If the Nancy of the family won't have them they take the Evelyn. That is what I am afraid of,' I should say to Nancy, in your place, 'and I really don't know how to stand it; please tell me exactly everything that happened by the staircase.' I should make her give me a full descrip----"

"Stop, Rattle, stop! You really do say such dreadful things," complained Evelyn, putting her hands over her ears to shut out anything else I might have been able to say. "You really are what Mr. Curtis once said you were----"

"Oh? What?" I asked. For one can't help always being interested in what people have said of one, even if the people don't exactly thrill one. "What did Mr. Curtis call me?"

"An artless and opinionated kid," said Evelyn, so listlessly that, disgusted as I was, I hadn't the heart to tell her what I thought of her precious Mr. Curtis; a pompous mile of measuring-tape! "You really can't enter into one's feelings yet. I'd much rather die or go into Miss Gates's Nursing Home for life than say a single word of all that to Nancy! And promise, Rattle!" she added, suddenly, "promise that you will never say a word of it either. Promise, Honour Bright, that you will never breathe a single syllable of it to her. Oh, if you did----"

"All right, old thing, I won't; don't get so fearfully excited. I've promised now. I always do what I say I will, don't I? I've never broken my word yet," I said, drawing myself up to my full height, which unfortunately made me bump the gas-bracket, hard. Rubbing my head, I said, "You're simply spoiling two lives, that's all."

"Oh, no; I expect he'll get over it, as you said yourself," was Evelyn's dreary answer, "and as for me, I shall go away and be a V.A.D. as soon as the time's up and I needn't be under Aunt Victoria's wing any more. I've got all my Red Cross certificates, and I ought to do some useful war-work."

"But, my goodness, d'you expect this war will still be going on, Evelyn, when you're twenty-five?"

"Captain Masters says it'll last till the youngest of our politicians die, so I expect it'll be going on when I'm seventy," said Evelyn.

You see the kind of mood she was in!

In fact, I was feeling rather pessimistic and ruffled myself as I strolled out of the Lair again.

For, you know, Evelyn dragging that promise out of me has just scotched a nice little plan that I had been making on my own.

I thought, "Well, if that silly Evelyn won't go and have it out with Nancy, I will go myself; I will tell her the whole complicated affair and hear what she has to say. Why not?"

However, that, you see, was nipped in the bud. I am a man of my word, or a woman, or a flapper, whichever you like to call it, and my lips are sealed by my own hand as far as Nancy is concerned.

But here a ray of hope dawns upon me. _I haven't sealed them as far as anybody else is concerned_. I haven't said that I wouldn't say anything to the other principal actor in this performance. So why shouldn't I speak to Mr. Curtis?

In fact, I shall. I have made up my mind to speak to him as soon as I get the opportunity!

The chance came sooner than I expected it would.

I went out for my usual afternoon walk, up near that field that is all riddled with trenches, where I had come upon Penny that afternoon when I little dreamt what it was he was up to.

And again I passed the Class, singing, "When the Boys come Home," with, trailing a long way after them on the road, the leggy, eyeglassed figure of Evelyn's adored one.

He looked at me as much as to say, "Why are you alone, not with HER?" but I wasn't damped.

"You are just the very person I want to see," I told him in a friendly way, stopping short as he saluted. "Will you see me home by the longest way round, please?"

"Wh--what? Oh! certainly! With pleasure, Miss Elizabeth," said Mr. Curtis; with a great deal of hesitation would have been truthfuller. Evidently he was alarmed beyond words at the idea of this _tête-à-tête_ with the artless and opinionated one, and couldn't think what on earth it was going to be about.

It was on the tip of my tongue to say: "Do not agitate yourself, my good young man! this is out-of-doors, with no staircase window rattling, and at any moment there are motor-lorries and people passing, so you needn't think I shall expect you to behave to me as you did to Nancy."

However, I realised that this would be quite the wrong opening. So I said nothing for a moment, but merely trudged along by his side, in the gloaming, oh, my darling, when the lights were falling low.

To return to prose. We were going down the road to the Junction that Mr. Lascelles and I had whizzed down on our way to Nancy's wedding.

What ages ago that seemed now! It really does seem as if we had never had what I used to call the "Incubus" in the house with us at all....

However, here was this other creature wondering what in the world it was I had got to say to him.

It was a situation that called for the greatest delicacy and tact, as it says in the papers.

I thought I had better stop beating about the bush, take the bull by the horns and begin at once with the main issue.

I began: "Mr. Curtis! You know that my sister Evelyn is desperately in love with you?----"

At this he turned round on me like a jaguar at bay or something of that sort.

His voice was as sharp as any old pistol shot as he rapped out at me, "Miss Elizabeth! I don't know what your idea may be in making this kind of joke; but, if you don't mind my saying so, we will have no more of it. I consider it to be very poor taste."

You would have known he had been a schoolmaster, wouldn't you, by the way he said that? Schoolmasters always talk about "we" when they mean just themselves, just like the Kaiser.

And he--Mr. Curtis, I mean--started striding away so fast that, long as my own legs are, I had to put my best foot foremost to keep up with him.

"Mr. Curtis, Mr. Curtis," I exclaimed. "It isn't a joke----"

"It is not a joke to me," said Mr. Curtis grimly, through the gathering darkness.

"No, nor to me," I said, panting a little, for I was out of breath galloping after him like this, "nor to Evelyn."

"Please, I do not think we need bring your sister's name into it," said Mr. Curtis, as stiff as a dress-shirt that has just come home from the laundry.

He must be frantically in love, mustn't he, to think that Evelyn's mere name is too good to have her youngest sister mention it?

"But I must," I insisted. "I had to mention Evelyn's name, because it's about her that I want to speak to you."

"I should prefer it if you chose some other subject for conversation," said that awful Mr. Curtis that Evelyn was breaking her heart over at this moment. How true it is that Love is blind! I should think he must be deaf as well, besides not having any sense of humour!

However, faint heart never won fair gentleman! Not that Mr. Curtis is fair, being one of these men who is much of a muchness with their own khaki. I do like a man to be one thing or the other. Either definite black or quite fair or even red; but to get on with what I was saying to Mr. Curtis.

"I really mean it," I insisted, trying to keep in step with him. "My sister Evelyn is fearfully in love with you. I--I am very anxious about her because of it!"

"Miss Elizabeth, you must allow me to beg you not to say these things," barked Mr. Curtis, still doing the heavy schoolmaster. "Since it is not a very doubtful joke on your part, it is a very unfortunate and incomprehensible mistake."

"It isn't," I insisted, striding along by the side of the man who was going to be my brother-in-law, or I would know the reason why. "Strange as it may seem, it's the absolute truth."

"I am the best judge of that," said the stony voice of Mr. Curtis, just above me. "Since you have broached the subject, Miss Elizabeth, I may as well tell you that I have the best possible reason for knowing that Miss Evelyn does not and could not ever care for me in the least."

"She told you so, I suppose?"

This satire was quite lost on him.

If you notice, satire nearly always is, on everybody. You have only got to say a thing without smiling and everybody takes it literally and sees nothing further in it.

"She did tell me, since you must know," said Mr. Curtis, shortly.

But at the back of his words there was such a sort of quiver of sorrow and yearning and hopeless loneliness that I overlooked the rude things he'd said about me. I could not help feeling sorry for him.

"Because a woman says a thing it isn't always a sign that it is perfectly true," I informed him. "It is not true that Evelyn does not care for you. Even if she says so one-hundred-and-sixty-five times a day, it isn't true, Mr. Curtis. You aren't the only person with 'reasons' for what you say, either."

He turned towards me very quickly.

It's a shame that all these goings-on and excitement didn't happen in the summer last year, when one could have seen a young man's face and what he looked like when he was walking down a country lane beside one, talking about Life and Love and things.

By this time it was so dusk I couldn't see what the expression on Mr. Curtis's face was like at all.

But I daresay it was just as anxious and agitated as his voice as he turned to me and said, "I want to know what you mean. I want to know what reasons you have for supposing that--that--that what you have hit on is the truth."

I said, with the proud consciousness of being perfectly truthful, "I didn't hit on it. I shouldn't have believed it, but that--well! Evelyn told me so herself."

"What?" cried Mr. Curtis, and turned round in such agitation and so quickly that his eyeglasses fell off his nose and dangled violently over his not-nearly-broad-enough chest.

"Yes," I said firmly. "Evelyn told me. I had it all out with her, more than a week ago. She'd simply murder me, too, if she knew that I was talking about her to you and telling you all about it at this moment."

There was a long, long pause as we walked along.

The voices of the Class came faintly to us from further down the road as they tramped along, singing:

"_There's a sil--ver loin--ing Threw ther dark claoud shoin--ing----_"

And then Mr. Curtis said to me in the quickest, most uncertain voice, "Quite right. I ought not to be discussing--HER, even with you."

Then another pause, after which he said, more quickly still, "I've _got_ to know. Please tell me exactly what she did say; every word, if you can."

Well, thank goodness, I have a memory like a gramophone. I can remember every syllable that people said and how they said it.

I simply took this memory of mine back to that afternoon when I found Evelyn sobbing in her bedroom, and I rattled it all off, with much expression, to the young man who had been the cause of those sobs.

He said in that quick voice, "I can't believe it. I can't believe it!"

"You will have to," I said. "If you had any sense," I added, to this young man who'd been what they call "_so-brilliant-up-at-Oxford_," "you would know that I couldn't possibly have made that story up. Made-up stories," I said, "always sound so much more like Life than a real one. That is one of the ways by which you tell the difference. That is what they mean by truth is stranger than fiction. There is nothing more improbable than the things that go on in real life," said I, meditatively. "I have been finding that out all this autumn."

But I found that Mr. Curtis hadn't been listening to one word of my interesting theories.

He was striding down the road beside me again so fast that I had to run a little, muttering, "Nancy! She minded that about Nancy?"

Just as he was saying this we arrived at that end of the village where those semi-detached and furnished with those castor-oil plant villas are that I told you about, where the Masters are in billets.

No light coming out of them, of course, but you could tell them by the dark gables against the pale sky.

Here, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, Mr. Curtis stopped.

"Miss Elizabeth," he said earnestly, "you have said on your honour that you are in earnest? You are serious about what you have just told me?"

"Yes, I don't say on my honour twice as a rule," I said, rather snappily.

"It is true, then," said Mr. Curtis, going off in his daze again.

Then again he woke up out of it and said briskly:

"Very well. In that case there is only one thing to be done, Miss Elizabeth."

I urged him to let me know what it was, of course, but he went on to say, "Thank you very much for what you have told me. I'll say good evening."

"Good evening?" I echoed, astonished.

"Yes, I think we part company here," he said firmly, saluting again. "I must go in and call upon Mrs. Masters."

"No, you don't," I said, gently but firmly. That is, not very gently, but quite firmly. "You don't go in and see my sister Nancy without my hearing what it is all going to be about."

For, you know, although _I_ had promised Evelyn solemnly that I wasn't going to tell Nancy anything, _he_ hadn't. I certainly didn't see why I should be done out of hearing him do it. Of course, I knew that it was about Evelyn that he was going to talk to Nancy.

He said, very stiffly, "This matter is between ourselves, Miss Elizabeth."

But I said, "No fear. I told you everything. I don't see why I should be cut out of all the fun now, just as if I were a little child that you talk French before as soon as the conversation begins to be a little interesting. In fact, I won't. I'll _be_ 'opinionated.' I am coming in with you now!"