CHAPTER III

THE INCUBUS IN THE HOUSE

I say, dear readers, have you ever had to live in the house with a person you absolutely hate? It's awful.

I've had some experience of it already.

When I was at school, it was our German mistress whom I loathed with a black and bitter hatred. I can't tell you how every detail about her used to get on my nerves, from the way she did her tow-coloured hair in plaits round her head (that you could see was never washed) to the way she used to stump into the classroom on her large flat feet and call out in her odious Hanover accent: "Elizabet, I shall r-r-report you! Elizabet, why zis noise? Sit immediately down and write out two hundred times, '_I shall not talk in Preparation: I shall not talk in Preparation._'"

Do you know, when I left school I simply cried for joy, just because I was leaving "Fraulein"! (I wonder how many English schoolgirls have felt that delight!) Never again should I hear her murder the King's English! Never again should I behold her everlasting red check blouse that always smelt of the golosh cupboard! Never, never again should I have to sit next to her in church and feel myself tingling all over with the exasperation of being anywhere near a person I so disliked!

When they read of the atrocities in Belgium, some people said they would never have believed such things of the Germans. They'd always considered the Germans a noble, brave, splendid, intelligent and all that sort of thing Nation. They were surprised. I wasn't. I'd believe ANYTHING of a nation that produced people like our "Fraulein" at school.

My goodness, how I detested her!

And now that old, well-known feeling of exasperation and dislike has come back to me here, at the Moated Grange, Mud Flats.

All because of the person I once imagined was going to turn out such a ray of sunshine in our house: all because of this horrid, red-haired, giggling, school-boyish microbe of a little officer-boy that we've got to have billeted on us. He's been here a week now.

For seven whole days we've had the Grange sort of permeated with him. We've had him taking up the bathroom for hours and hours the first thing in the morning, as well as when he comes in caked with mud in the afternoon, and using absolutely all the hot water and leaving his disgusting shaving-brush face downwards on the soap, always: we've had him whistling and singing the whole time, too.

The sounds of his splashing and wallowing like a grampus are always accompanied by the sounds of his bellowing bursts of song. His favourite seems to be that Gaiety thing:

"_Oh, please don't try to flirt with me: Don't try to flirt with me----_"

(As if one could imagine anybody wanting to!)

Then we have him doing what I call "the New Army stamp" downstairs. We have him at breakfast, odiously chirpy and gay: "Morning, Mrs. Verdeley! Morning, Miss Evelyn! Morning, Miss Nancy!" in the kind of voice that sounds as if he might just as well say "My dear girls" and have done with it.

To me he just says "Good morning," in quite another tone of voice. (Thank goodness, I have managed to snub Mr. Frank Lascelles into that!)

Then, no sooner has he dashed off to what he calls his work than he seems to be dashing in to lunch again, mud to the eyes, and monopolising all the bathroom again first and all the conversation afterwards. The house is never free of him and his cigarettes and his matches. And his floppy khaki cap seems to be always flung down in three places at once.

I don't know how Aunt Victoria can stand the new state of affairs. I don't know how anybody can stand it.

Curiously enough, everybody at the Grange seems to like him except me.

They all take his part!

Nancy frowned like a thunder-cloud at lunch because I said something about the "REAL Army," meaning the one that was here before the war, and before they took to making officers out of young men-in-the-City and secretaries of suburban tennis-clubs. I heard the Incubus say he'd been all that. He used to be a Bank Clerk, too, before he became what he calls a soldier.

I don't call what he's doing here "soldiering." Do you?

My idea of soldiering is leading charges at the head of your men, with a drawn sword flashing in one hand and a revolver in the other, and you shouting, "Come on, lads! Let 'em have it! No quarter for the Prussian Guard! Remember Wittenberg!" Or else being found covered with blood standing with your back propped against a listening-post, or whatever they're called, with half your company dead at your feet, holding up a battalion of Germans with one dummy machine-gun.... Not much of that sort of thing about Tem. Sec. Lieut. Lascelles' duties. Well, of course there couldn't be, _here_, but he doesn't even seem to be preparing for it. Instead of that, he goes in for the most footling jobs.

Feeding the men is the funniest. A great G.S. wagon comes along the Junction Road, heaped with their victuals. Revolting masses of raw meat, girls, just like at the Zoo. Loaves, stuck together in fours. Sickening great lumps of cheese. Millions of tins of Tickler's jam. Well, these things are all carted into the empty cottage next door to the post-office, where our old gardener Penny used to live. Here these half-oxen and other raw joints are hacked and sawn and chopped up and flung at the sappers as if they were a lot of hungry jaguars. They tuck these rations away under their arms, or in their haversacks, or string-bags, or anyhow, and tramp off to get their landladies to cook them--the lumps of meat, I mean. Of course, it's the Quartermaster-Sergeant who's supposed to be responsible for all these disgusting proceedings, but the Incubus is most fearfully faddy about seeing that he does it all right. Absurd of him. I hate a man to know anything about housekeeping.

Then he (the Incubus) has the men's billets to pay once a week. Oh, my dears, that Day! The importance of the Ker-reature!

The amount of talk we have about "Four hundred pounds from my Company on me this moment!" And then the fuss-fuss-fuss over Sapper Stick-in-the-Mud, whose billet has been moved and who's got to have breakfast fivepence down on one form, and dinner one-and-a-penny down on another form! It bores me, stiff. I don't know how you can possibly look upon as a real soldier a being who, if you please, has to be always seeing about boots. For we always have yards about those, too. Lance-Corporal Thingammijig's boots, and how they have to be sent off to the London, Chatham and Dover regimental boot-maker to be soled and heeled, and how the bill's come in and had to be sent to Headquarters with a solemn inscription: "_These repairs are rendered necessary by fair wear and tear. F. Lascelles._"

I call him a mixture of a kitchen-maid and a cashier and a nursery-governess!

And when I said so to Aunt Victoria she actually said quite sharply, "Nonsense. He is a young man who has taken on a number of duties that are entirely strange to him, and I'm sure he is doing them very conscientiously and well, and, Elizabeth, I won't have you talking about 'real' soldiers: they're all alike doing 'real' work and they'll be in 'real' peril of their lives, presently, just like the others, and, Mary, tell Cook Mr. Lascelles likes the beef a little under-done."

Even Aunt Victoria!

It must be because she's deaf and can't hear half the noise he makes and doesn't understand the other half.

As for Evelyn and Nancy, they're sillier and sillier about him. I must admit it's not the "lovey-dovey" Khaki romance kind; no, even they seem to have grasped the fact that nobody could possibly be attracted in that way. But their chummy sort of way is just as annoying. They laugh at all his _petty_ jokes! They listen to his stories, even the ones that we heard from a girl at school that her brother told her in Nineteen Thirteen! They keep on saying, "What a dear he is to have in the house" (dear at any price!) and "Doesn't it make one feel how much we've missed all these years, not having any brother of our own," until it makes me feel literally sick.

I shall be really rude to him one of these days. I shall be driven to it, I know I shall!

* * * * * * * *

(_Here follow some comments by Second Lieutenant Frank Lascelles._)

Whew! I said the youngest girl at this billet of mine was a peach. A lemon would have been nearer the mark. Ever since I've been at Mud Flats she's gone out of her way--I swear she has--to be a perfect little beast to me.

Don't know what I've done. The other two girls are the best of pals with me. But this little--well, I'd better not say it. The Peach--for she is a Peach to look at, all the same!--the Peach seems to think it'll hurt her to give me a glance. Whenever I'm about she turns away. Never see anything of the girl but her profile. It's a jolly pretty profile, that I will say for her. Still, that's no reason why she should go about pretending to be a queen on a coin, always side-face on, eh?

Nothing I say or do makes any diff. She pretends she thinks I'm talking to Evelyn or Nancy, the sisters!

And the fact is--well, it doesn't sound very polite to two jolly nice girls, but neither of 'em is a patch upon her. Little demon! To-day she cut me in the village, walking down to the Hard. I swear she saw me coming. She turned her back and glared into a shop window until I'd gone by, walking with Curtis. He saw her. It was only a butcher's shop, too. Absolutely no excuse. Told her about it at lunch.

"You cut me dead," I said.

She just raised her eyebrows and said: "Oh? Was that you going by? So sorry. Hadn't you a different sort of coat on? I must have thought you were one of the sea scouts."

Now, considering the beastly little scouts run about twelve years old and four foot high, it was a little thick, wasn't it? However, "there are others." I'm not breaking my heart about the Peach! I'd just like to see how much ruder she could get; merely as a matter of curiosity!

(_The youngest girl resumes._)

If it only weren't for this man, or, rather, Incubus, in the house here, I should think that Mud Flats was so changed for the better since the soldiers have come down.

Even the country doesn't look so dead.

The brown beach and the lead-grey sea and the dove-grey and primrose evening sky were desolate enough when they were only landscape. But they make a jolly background to the workings of the pontoon-class. The crowds of men, you know, dragging and hammering, and shoving away at things, make it look like pictures or groups of statues of ancient soldiery.

For the clothes they wear when they are toiling about in the mud here is not a bit the commonplace, usual, khaki uniforms in which they turned up from the station.

Because they now have always to be in and out of mud baths, they wear sort of white canvas overall sort of things that they have mudded and got rained on until they are just the colour of clay. In fact, the things do look like a coat of clay that has been plastered all over their bodies. Their trousers they tuck up about their knees. On their heads they wear Balaclava woollen caps that are just any old shape.

And what with the bare sunburnt limbs, and the reflections in the water, and the coming and going on shore, and the boats pushed off, and the singing and shouting and deep-voiced laughter heard through the lilac-tinted twilight, why! it seems to carry one right back into the days of the landing of the Romans! Before this country got so civilised and educated that girls could grow up on a sea-coast of it without ever catching a glimpse of real men doing a real strenuous man's work!

And then we hear there are going to be sports, and concerts, and dances for the Sappers, and Staff Officers coming down from London to inspect, and quite a lot of other excitements that Mud Flats never, never dreamt of before the war.

How I should have enjoyed the thought of them if only we'd got one of the other officers billeted here, instead of the Incubus!

The one he was walking with the other afternoon looked rather nice. Very tall and dark and rather shy-looking. Interesting, I thought: I wonder who he was....

But I can't ask. You see, having made up my mind to be icy cold and as prickly as a hedgehog to the Incubus, I can't allow myself to take any sort of interest in his friends, which makes me dislike the Incubus himself more than ever, of course.

For he is on my nerves. Meals are a perfect punishment to me, because he is always there. I spend no end of time and energy avoiding him, whether it is in this house in the evening or walking about our transmogrified village.

"Rattle, you are getting perfectly childish about Mr. Lascelles," Evelyn said to me one day quite crossly in the Lair. "If you don't like him, you needn't show it quite so patently."

"Why not?" I said, at my flippantest. "You and Nancy don't mind 'showing patently' that you do like him. His head is getting quite turned enough by the attention he's allowed to have from you two. I suppose you're going to toss up for him later on?"

"Don't be silly, Rattle," said Evelyn in her most grown-up voice. "You know you've been angry with Mr. Lascelles ever since that first afternoon he turned up, chiefly because you are angry with yourself!"

"Angry with myself?"

"Yes. Because you were caught out, talking nonsense as usual."

"Pooh! I never thought about that again," said I, hideously annoyed.

"I'm sure you have," contradicted Nancy. "And you're so afraid that Mr. Lascelles might think you'd been too interested about him that you can only fly to the opposite extreme, and bite his head off whenever he tries to make friends with you."

"Nothing of the kind," I said. "I don't like him because I don't like him."

"You allow him to notice it."

"Any reason why I shouldn't?" I said.

"Yes," said Evelyn. "For one thing he might, if he were a very conceited young man, imagine that you were really losing your heart to him."

"Oh, good gracious!" I said, impatiently. "Did anybody ever hear such poodle-doodle?"--this is our family word for absolute rot. Which it was.

I felt myself turning scarlet as the Turkey twill cushions of the Lair with pure annoyance. I said: "It's you two who he might quite well imagine were losing your hearts!"

Nancy laughed. Evelyn said: "Really, I'd rather he thought that of me than that he should see me behaving--well, not like a lady, Rattle!"

It was said in quite a different voice from the one in which she usually scolds me and Nancy when we have shocked her about anything. It was as if she really meant what she said, and the expression on Nancy's face was just as grave. They did really mean it, they did really think that I had behaved in a rotten way to the little blighter--(Yes, now be shocked at the word "blighter." He uses it as a slang word. I mean it literally. I mean he "blights" the whole of my enjoyment like a worm in the bud)--the horrid little blighter who has spoilt everything by coming here.

Yes, spoilt everything! That's exactly what he has done if he wants to know. I always used to think that nothing in the world could come between us three girls getting on together better than any sisters who have ever lived together in one house! And now here's this "incubus" come, and what's the result? What used to be a happy family is split up into factions! Two against one! Civil war, like the Wars of the Roses!

They say that's what happens as soon as one young man plumps himself into the middle of a group of girls, however attached the girls may have been to each other up to then. Only, I imagined it would have to be an attractive young man--not an eyesore.

Well, there was nothing more said on the subject of him. Presently Evelyn broke the silence in the Lair by asking Nancy what on earth she'd done with the bodkin. Just as if nothing had happened.

But it has.

There's a feeling in the air. I know what it means. Again, it's like something I've felt before at school.

It means that I, "Rattle," who used to be more or less the baby and the pet, have been sent to Coventry!

They're not going to invite me to any more hair-brushing family conclaves. They're going to be "polite." They're going to let me realise that they disapprove.

Here's a nice thing to happen after all those years and years and years of happy family life at the Grange!

Yes: I know I used to grumble at those years like anything when they were there: but how I wish, now, that they were back again! Oh, for the happy, happy days before any of those disgusting soldiers came to Mud Flats! Oh, for the top-hole time that we had, just by ourselves, without the Incubus in the house!

_See_ if I don't get even with them all, somehow!