CHAPTER XXIII

THE VISIT

Well, I went.

I mean, to see Mr. Lascelles in the Nursing Home for wounded officers at Nowhere Junction.

I thought it would be rather cat-like not to when he did want to see me, after all, even if he is engaged to somebody else--I mean, to somebody. Besides, he might want to say something about some of his things that he had left at his billet with us.

So off I went on what you can only describe as a pious errand. It was a horrible day, neither wet nor dry, but cold and piercing and depressing. I think the most depressing day I've ever spent in the whole course of my life.

Everything went wrong from the start. First I forgot one of the parcels that I'd got to take Mr. Lascelles. Then my suspender broke. And though I fastened it up with a safety-pin at the Junction waiting-room, still, you never know when a thing like that may not give, and there it is hanging over you like a pale-blue sword of Damocles the whole time that you're out.

Then I missed my way to the place and wasted about a quarter of an hour going back to the right turning.

Then, when I had got to the blessed home--a large, new, red-brick building surrounded by sprouts of laurel--there was some mistake about my having come.

They didn't seem to realise that I had been asked to visit a wounded officer.

They showed me into an awful little bleak waiting-room with nothing in it but a gas-fireplace and a framed photograph of a lot of nurses in a group, with Miss Gates in the middle with her hair done like they used to when mother was a girl.

I waited for what seemed like an hour, which, of course, made me furious. I should have been far better employed sitting at home going on embroidering Nancy's chemise-top or darning my own stockings or something really productive like that, instead of hanging on waiting until this wretched matron-fiancée person of Mr. Lascelles's chose to think that I had been there long enough.

I wondered why a woman like that with a big nursing home of her own and what they call one of the most sacred professions should choose to go and get herself engaged to be married.

And at her age, too!

Just as I was thinking this the door opened, and in came the so-called fair fiancée herself--Miss Gates--the matron.

She had a little starchy cap perched on her brown hair with lots of grey in it--I mean the hair, not the cap--and she also had on a business-like looking navy blue alpaca gown with little lawn collar and cuffs, but no apron. What a very different sort of bride she'll make from Nancy!

Well, in she came and shook hands very briskly with me and said: "Oh, yes, Mr. Lascelles does expect you; so I think I may permit you to see him for a few minutes."

Permit you, you know! That made me so annoyed that I didn't do what I intended to do--namely, ask if I might congratulate her on her engagement to our old friend.

Yes, I say old friend because when a person has been billeted on you, you get to know him better in a week or two than you would get to know in years and years some young man that you only saw at hockey matches or at Badminton or subscription dances and that sort of thing.

Well, led by this matron, I went upstairs to an upper landing that went all round the well of the staircase.

There was a sound of playing the piano and singing "When the Girls come up to Town----" from one of the rooms where I suppose a lot of them were, and a quite young youth came out in very beautiful grey mufti and only one leg, poor darling, hopping and holding on to the banisters and laughing at some one behind him.

"Now, Mr. Tracey, Mr. Tracey," the matron called, "where are your crutches?"

"Oh, Sister, I do hate the beastly things," said this young wounded officer in a very drawly sort of voice, looking hard through a monocle at me. "They simply ruin the set of one's coat, don't you know."

"Once a nut, always a nut, I suppose," said Miss Gates, and then she opened a door and said, "Here's a visitor to see you, Frankie."

Mr. Lascelles was sitting up in bed, looking, I must say, not nearly as well as he did when he left the Moated Grange. I don't believe he is one bit better for having left there, in spite of being nursed by his fiancée. He was wearing the same striped cream and pale blue pyjamas that he had on the night of the Zeppelin raid, and his red-gold hair was all rumpled under the bandage round his head, and his eyes were much brighter than they had any business to be, and his cheeks were flushed--feverishly flushed.

As for his hands, I could have cried over them! They were shrunk so very tiny, and they had got so white and transparent, with blue veins showing through the backs of them. They felt so absurdly soft, too, for a man's hands, for he took both of them to hold my hand when I put it out to him and said, "How do you do?"

Never again shall I call the young man, as I have once or twice called him, by his sort of pet name of "Lonely Subaltern"!

You see, never again will he be that, now that he is engaged to this business-like person who owns this nursing home.

I suppose she will never leave him. I thought she was never going to leave him, even this afternoon, when I came to see him, for there she sat smiling patronisingly upon me as I brought out the various little presents and parcels that I had got with me.

"Thank you, it was most awfully sweet of you, Miss Elizabeth," he said, smiling for the first time really as he touched a little white china jar of lemon-cheese that I had made for him, tied up with lemon-coloured ribbon off a chocolate box.

Then I said something about the weather being very warm for the time of year, and Miss Gates said that personally she had thought it was rather cold, and Mr. Lascelles said in a sort of duty voice that being in bed still he hadn't noticed much what the weather was like.

And then a terrible pause ensued, and nobody said anything or seemed to know what to say next.

I was just going to get up and say that Aunt Victoria was expecting me back immediately.

Just then the door opened and the nurse came in and said: "Sister, there is an officer downstairs come to ask how many patients you will be able to take in by Wednesday."

"Oh, I will come down and see him at once," said Miss Gates, getting up briskly. Then she said to me: "Excuse me a moment," and went out.

I was only too thankful to excuse her for any number of minutes. All curiosity, of course, because of what I had to ask Mr. Lascelles. I was determined not to go back without having found out something I had been bothering about ever since I had first got his message.

So no sooner had the door closed behind Miss Gates's blue alpaca back than I turned to Mr. Lascelles, and began gabbling quickly so as to get it all in. "Oh, before I go away, there is something I simply must ask you, Mr. Lascelles."

"Oh, yes, do tell me what it is," he said, in a much more natural sort of voice--his old schoolboyish one, like before he was engaged. "I say, it was most frightfully ripping of you to come."

"Oh, not at all," I said politely; "somebody had to come, and Evelyn and Nancy were busy, and Aunt Victoria can't stand these draughty trains, so, you see, I was the only one who could manage it."

"Otherwise, I suppose you would have let one of the others do it?" said Mr. Lascelles, in rather a hurt voice, though what he had to be hurt about goodness only knows!

So I began again, and said: "Look here, Mr. Lascelles. You know you wrote a letter to me the day before you were taken--I mean, the day before you came here?"

"Yes, I did," said little Mr. Lascelles, flushing up to the roots of his hair again, "and look here! I've something to say about that. I never got any answer to it, Miss Elizabeth."

"Well! I don't think," I said, "there could be any answer to it. You see, in the letter, you asked me to come up and see you because you wanted to speak to me; and I couldn't very well come up and see you when you had just been whisked off--I mean, when you had just gone away to a nursing home."

"You might have written," said Mr. Lascelles, sitting up, a little, bolt upright figure, in the bed, and speaking quite resentfully. "I thought you might have written if you wanted to know what it was all about, that is."

"Of course I wanted to know," I said, speaking as dignifiedly and calmly as I could, and gazing aloofly at the bottle of eau de Cologne on his dressing-table. "I knew there was something you wanted to ask me, even before that night. Will you tell me what it is?"

"Sure you care to hear?"

"I shouldn't ask," I said, quite angrily, "if I didn't want to know!"

"Very well, then, I had better tell you," said Mr. Lascelles, also gabbling a little, as if he wasn't quite sure that his destined bride might not come prancing in at any moment.

"You--you--that--that----"

He actually began to stammer in a most absurd way and to look more feverishly flushed than ever as he went on at last: "You remember that blessed photograph that you sent to me when I was the 'Lonely Subaltern'?"

I said, rather sharply: "I don't think you need remind me of that now."

"Why not? Why not?" asked Mr. Lascelles, quite heatedly.

Well, of course, it was obvious why not.

It was because I didn't think an engaged young man ought to rake up any bygones, however merely platonic they were, with any sort of other girl, if his fiancée could be called a girl exactly.

However, I couldn't tell him this; it sounded so absolutely silly, so I adopted my cool, dignified manner again and merely said: "Well, but I thought we had arranged to forget about that idiotic quarrel of ours."

"It was the quarrel I was remembering," said Mr. Lascelles, pushing his hair off his fevered brow at he spoke; "although you did tear it, you know you did, and that is what I have been going to ask you about that photograph. You know I have got one half and you kept the other half of it. I want to know whether I mayn't have it to join on to my half." This was unexpected. In a kind of way it was touching, his still thinking about old friends and caring to have photographs of them. But I couldn't let him see I was touched. It would seem so absurd.

So I spoke as if I had a heart as light as a feather.

"Join on? Oh, no; I don't think so," I said. "It would be too silly; it would make such an idiotic mark right across. I think those bits had better be burnt."

Mr. Lascelles said nothing for a minute. Then he shut up his mouth very tight under his baby moustache as he said, rather shortly: "Very well, since you won't let me have that, can't you let me have another photograph some time, Miss Betty?"

I was so pleased--I mean surprised--to hear that old name coming out that I nearly said in the first moment, "Yes, I will send you another copy." However, thank goodness, I refrained in time. I think I was reminded by hearing the jingling of the keys and the quick step in the passage of Miss Gates, his fiancée.

Let her give him her photograph--hers is the only woman's photograph he has got any right to want, or even to say he wants, since I don't suppose he wants mine at all, really.

So I got up from the white bedroom chair and said with a conventional sort of smile: "I am so afraid I haven't got another copy of that photograph."

"Is there no such thing as getting another copy off the negative?" demanded Mr. Lascelles, quite in his own quarrelling voice.

"No, I don't think so," I said.

Mr. Lascelles, sitting up there in his pyjamas, and looking very nearly as angry as that afternoon when I had slapped his face for him, said: "Why not? Why not?"

In another minute I should have told him why, and I should have said something quite bitter, too, on the subject of the greed and grabbiness of engaged men who ask for the photographs of other girls as well as those of their own legitimate fiancées--but, of course! at that moment the door opened, and in whisked his everlasting legitimate fiancée once more.

"Now, Frankie, I think you have talked quite enough," she said, in that brisk, managing voice of hers which I should find so trying if I were her fiancé. "You will be getting a temperature, you know, and it will be ages before you are allowed out again, and as for duty--oh! no, no. Miss Verdeley," turning to me, "I am afraid that I shall have to send you away now."

But I was already at the door. I wasn't waiting to be sent away, I can tell you!

And so I told her practically, for I said: "Oh, yes, I have been longing to go for the last ten minutes. I have a really very important engagement at home that I have got to keep, only I thought I had better wait and say good-bye to you, Miss Gates."

And I shook hands with her, though I didn't want to a bit, really.

I noticed she wore a plain gold signet ring on her engagement finger.

I suppose Mr. Lascelles will choose the real engagement ring for her later when he is well enough to go out.

I didn't shake hands with him; I just didn't think he deserved it. I only nodded to him and said: "Well, good-bye again, Mr. Lascelles! I am so glad to have seen you looking so much better."

Which I hadn't, of course!

"And in such good hands."

Which, of course, I thought awful--still, of course, they were his choice!

Then I went out of the room and downstairs and out of the house and through the town again, walking so quickly that when I got to the station I found I had three-quarters of an hour to wait for the train back to Mud Flats.