CHAPTER XV

MOSTLY CONVERSATION

"To talk of Love is soon to make Love."--PROVERB.

After this strange question of mine, there was a moment's pause.

It rang in my ears still, my quick, but quietly uttered,--

"Isn't your name Richard Wynn?"

What on earth had possessed me to say that? The moment after I was as surprised at it as he was himself. Or wasn't he surprised? His face had hardly changed. He looked quite steadily back at me. What did he think? I wondered in a flash. What would he say?

Quite quietly he replied:

"No, no, it isn't. Surely you know my name's Holiday?"

As if I hadn't ever heard it! How absurd I'd been! How idiotic! How wool-gathering!

I pulled myself together.

"Oh, I know," I said quickly and apologetically, as I caught up a handful of the poultry-food. "Yes. Of course, I know that."

"Then," returned Captain Holiday, "why did you ask me if my name was Richard Wynn?"

I laughed a little.

"It was a silly question," I admitted. "It must have sounded quite mad! Only for one minute, seeing you in these clothes, I suppose----"

He looked swiftly down at the shaggy cuff of that quite disreputable Norfolk jacket. "Seeing me in these clothes; yes----?"

"Tock, tock, tock," put in the grey hen.

"Well, you suddenly reminded me of somebody I used to know," said I, and I turned to scatter that handful to those clucking, calling fowls.

Captain Holiday--whose name ought to have been Curiosity--put his hands behind his back, and tilted his head to one side, taking almost the pose of a small boy who is still at the deadly age of questions. Evidently this tall young man had never outgrown it! How simply, but in what a not-to-be-put-off voice he persisted:

"What was this 'somebody' like?"

"I've just said he was something like you, Captain Holiday. That is," I added, "I couldn't really tell you if he were or not."

"What d'you mean by that?" Captain Holiday asked.

I laughed again. One simply could not feel impatient or annoyed with this extraordinarily inquisitive young man. He took one past that! So, as I walked on with my pail to the next coop, followed by the young man and the dog, I said:

"What I mean--if you must know all about it----"

"Yes, I must. I mean I'd love to."

Well! "knowing all about it" must be a sort of mild obsession of his. Perhaps he'd been Intelligence Officer or something. The only thing to be done appeared to be to humour him!

So I said:

"What I mean about that young man called Richard Wynn, your double, is that I can't honestly say I know what he was like!"

"Why can't you?" barked the catechist.

"Because I don't remember."

"You don't remember?" quite sharply from Captain Holiday. "How, don't remember? Why don't you?"

"Because it's such ages ago since I saw him," I replied. "Seven years! And what is the next question, please?"

The next question was a brusque

"How often had you seen him, then?"

"Often? Why, I saw him every day," I replied, going down on one knickerbockered knee to wrestle with the refractory door of a coop. "He stayed at my father's place for six months."

The voice above me decreed:

"Then, of course, you must know what the fellow was like."

Extraordinary, the constant interest he took in subjects which had absolutely nothing to do with him! But I'd said a man was like himself. That was next door to talking about what he was like himself--which Elizabeth had declared was all young men ever did want to talk about!

"I don't know," I persisted, rattling the wire-netted door. "I've forgotten Mr. Wynn's face."

"You can't have 'forgotten' the face of a man you saw every day of your life for six months," Captain Holiday informed me, authoritatively. "You must have been what? Thirteen or fourteen. No girl 'forgets' a man's face like that!"

"She does!" I declared.

"People don't 'forget' faces," he repeated. "It's nonsense."

"It is not," I cried, half-laughing, half-exasperated, as I rose. "People do forget what they've never taken very much notice of, even when it was there! I've no memory at all for faces. I only know what I thought of them at the time."

I thought his next question would be, "What did you think of the young man you imagine was like me?" But this was not what came. He demanded, more casually. "And what became of him?"

"I don't know," I replied. "I never heard. Except----" Here I suppressed a half-rueful smile at the thought of what I had heard, only some weeks ago, from this same long-forgotten Richard Wynn.

"Except what?" took up the Inquisitor.

I sighed elaborately. For a moment I felt almost inclined to tell him deliberately the whole madcap story of Richard Wynn's proposal of marriage to me; but for some reason I didn't.

So, looking straight at him, I adopted a tone of studied and explanatory politeness. I hoped this gentle irony might have the effect of making him a little bit ashamed of all his questions.

"I only heard from this Mr. Wynn once," I said. "Then he did not tell me what he was doing, or what had happened to him all these years. So I can't tell you. And I could not write to him, or ask him about anything, because I'd thrown away his letter."

"Thrown it away?" Captain Holiday exclaimed, quite loudly.

"I threw it away by mistake--with the address. So that was that--and I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that's absolutely all I can tell you about him, Captain Holiday!"

I scattered my last handful, let the last replete and peeping chick out of the last coop. Captain Holiday--perhaps feeling a trifle rebuked--said nothing further. Swinging my empty pail I ran down the hillside. He and his dog followed me through the farm gate and went on.

At the door of the kitchen I handed in my pail. The rosy farm-servant said to me:

"Miss, you'll have to run if you want to catch up your friends. They've been gone some time."

I glanced up at the clock.

"Is it so late, Maggie-Mary!" I exclaimed.

I sped through the yard and on to the up-and-down high road, thinking as I went the question that almost every Land Girl asks herself at some time:

"How did I ever manage to walk at any pace at all in the days when I wore hampering skirts to flap about me wherever I turned?"

Before I could find an answer to this question I found Captain Holiday at my side again!

"Let me walk along a bit of the way with you," he suggested quite nicely. "May I?"

What could I say but "If you like"? My way back to camp did take him past the Lodge, after all.

However, I didn't want another Longer Catechism. So, as we fell into step, walking towards the sunset, down the road with basking green on either hand, I decided to introduce the subject of the forthcoming and much-discussed Hospital Concert!

But I was not in time. It was Captain Holiday who started the conversation, and on lines that I hardly expected, but beginning, once again, with one of his questions!

"Is that little pal of yours engaged to be married?"

Surprised, I replied:

"Elizabeth? Miss Weare? To be married? I should think not! I mean, I don't think she ever means to marry."

"That's good," remarked Captain Holiday, cheerfully.

I stared at him.

"'Good'? Why good?"

He said "Oh!" and fumbled in the pocket of his Norfolk for his pipe.

"Oh, perhaps I meant she'd be all the more company for you down here. People in love are poisonously poor company, I find!" he went on, turning to me as if with a burst of confidence. Then he twinkled, gave me a swift glance, opened his lips as if to ask a question; shut them.

I knew what he meant.

Quickly and definitely I snapped out the answer to the question he hadn't asked.

"No! I'm not engaged either!" I said. Then, carrying this war of questions into the odd creature's country, I added, "Are you?"

"Why? I suppose you mean you find me poisonously poor company?" he asked, with a defiant jerk of the head in that scarecrow's tweed hat of his.

"Not at all," I said politely. "But are you?"

Instead of answering he stopped and glanced to the right. There was a break in the hedge.

"Shall we take this short cut home through the fields?" he said.

I followed him to the narrow, greasy path, if it were a path.

It seemed to me one of those short cuts home that are certainly the longest way round! ... How could I--oh, how could I not have realized already that all I wanted was to be walking anywhere--for any distance--with him!

That realization was not to come yet....

But to go back to the beginning of this ramble, Captain Holiday, striding and smoking beside me, said:

"Am I engaged? Well, I say! May I tell you something about myself?"

"That would be a change! Generally, you want to be told things about other people!" I said.

He gave a short laugh.

"Yes; well, now you can have a bit of your own back. I want a woman's point of view on a certain matter. You're sure it won't bore you? I don't mind if it does," he added quickly, with that quicker smile that always brushed any offence out of his words. "Women are put here to listen to men's grousing. However! Seriously, I want to talk to you. You could help me about this."

"I? Help you?" I said. "D'you mean it?" But I knew he meant it. Sincerity was in his tone. Also a new note--appeal.

I could not help feeling pleased. He did not think me a fool then, even if he had seen me first in circumstances that might have given him that impression. He thought that I could help him in his own difficulty, whatever it was.

This was where I suddenly found I must have skipped whole stages in my acquaintanceship with this young man. He had jumped from being a busybody and a stranger to being a friend--yes! A friend to whom one felt positively motherly--or at least sisterly.

I turned to him as we walked, and said:

"Of course I'd be glad to advise you in any way that would be of any use to you. You tell me first."

"Righto!" said Captain Holiday. "By Jove, here's some more of this wire. Never mind. We'll turn off here--I think I struck the wrong field. Well! You were asking me if I were engaged. I am not. I asked a girl to marry me, though, not so long ago."

He stopped. I said, sympathetically:

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Are you? Why?"

I couldn't help opening my eyes.

"Why? I mean--sorry she turned you down."

Now Captain Holiday opened his eyes.

"Who said she turned me down?" he asked.

In spite of how he improved upon acquaintance, in spite of his friendliness, his nice smile and ways, he was very difficult to make out.

"You said the girl wouldn't be engaged to you----" I began patiently.

"I said nothing of the kind," Captain Holiday interrupted, contradicting me flatly. "I told you I was not engaged--here, it must have been that other turning after all, we'll go back--not engaged, but that I had asked a girl to marry me."

More at sea than before, I retraced my steps down the path beside him, and suggested:

"Then, if the girl said 'Yes' to you----"

"She," explained Captain Holiday, looking serenely over the evening landscape, "did not say either 'Yes' or 'No.'"

Now I saw his difficulty!

Suspense!

Yes. I understood that. How I understood the chills--and flames--of that fever! Hadn't I suffered from them myself, in the days when I had had to think in turn. "He will," "He won't," or "Will he?"

"That's horrible for you," I agreed warmly to this other young man. "It's bad enough to know the worst. But not to know which it's to be is----"

"Quite so," finished Captain Holiday.

"Still, you needn't make up your mind at once that it will be the worst, need you?" I went on soothingly.

"You think I needn't?"

"Why d'you feel you must give up all hope?" I asked.

"Sometimes I don't," he admitted simply.

I nodded, saying:

"It's the other 'sometimes' that's so awful."

"Exactly," he said. "When I think 'after all, why should any girl like me particularly?'"

"You don't often think that, do you?"

"No, not often," said Captain Holiday serenely again, "only occasionally when I've had a bad night and feel off colour and pippy!"

I couldn't help laughing. The sustaining, intoxicating conceit of men! As Elizabeth says, it's the only thing that could keep them going since the war restrictions!

Then he looked quickly sideways at me.

"You think that's neck," he remarked. "Perhaps you think there is no reason why any girl should like me?"

And for the moment his voice dropped a tone, and there was a wistfulness on his brown face. I stopped laughing. I didn't want to hurt his feelings in any way. Besides, when one came to think of it, he was quite nice enough for a girl to like him--quite much!

Thoughtfully I said:--

"So much depends upon the kind of girl!" and then I asked, "What kind of girl is she?" in a tone as gentle as I could make it, so as to avoid jarring him.

But in quite a matter-of-fact, usual sort of tone the young man replied:

"Oh, well! She's the girl I want."

Helpful, wasn't it?

"I see," said I, not seeing anything, of course, except that, as Elizabeth once said, it's quite impossible to get a man to describe anything or anybody so that you know what they are like.

We walked on for a moment in silence, following our shadows on the goldy-green grass; evening shadows that caricatured a giant soldier man striding across the field beside a giantess of a Land Girl.

I began again:

"She might be the type of girl who honestly did not know herself whether it was 'Yes' or 'No' that she wanted to say," I said. "Some girls simply have to take lots of time to consider whether they care for the man in that way or not--even after he's asked them! They have to think things over. They have to look at the man from every point of view before they know their own minds about him. I've met that type of girl. I can't say I understand her mys----"

"Ah," he put in with a quick turn of the head, "you wouldn't be like that! You'd know at once if you could stand the man?"

"I think so," I said, a little shortly. I didn't want to be reminded of what my own views had been about "the man"--that is, Harry. They had led me into making a fool of myself. Hadn't I liked him at once, disastrously, from his first soft dark-eyed glances at me? What I was "like," myself, was not the question. Also I didn't see how it was going to help Captain Holiday.

He, on the other hand, seemed to think it might throw some light upon the subject.

"You'd know at once if it was all N. G. as far as your own feelings were concerned?" he persisted.

"At once," I agreed.

"That would save the other person a lot of trouble, of course," said the young man at my side. "I think you're right. One ought to 'know' at once, about that sort of thing. You would, you say?"

"Yes, I should. But there are such lots of different kinds of girls, Captain Holiday----"

"Of course, I don't see that."

"No. Because you're in love, you see, and people never do see more than just the one person then."

"I expect you're right again," said Captain Holiday. He looked down at me quite submissively--at me, to whom he'd laid down the law in that hectoring fashion every time he'd seen me! He might be right about cow-houses and the laws of gravity and about stock, as well as about any question in his own profession of soldiering--but at least he saw now that I could teach him something about the ways of human beings!

And I felt no longer a Land Girl who was still months away from earning her first stripe, but quite a woman of the world for once!

Encouragingly I went on:

"Perhaps she is the kind of girl who does mean 'Yes' all the time----"

"And didn't say so?"

"Because perhaps she put it off to make it seem all the more wonderful to you when it came," I suggested.

"Ah," he said. "It would be wonderful then?"

How little he must know about love, I thought, to ask such a question.

"Wonderful?" I said, looking away from him across to the sunset. In the radiance of the level rays a swarm of tiny insects spun enraptured--each thinking, possibly, that the sun had risen and shone only for him and his little winged love, creatures of a day.

"One five minutes of that," I said, as much to myself as to him, "is worth having lived for twenty stodgy years without it. Even if you lose it again it would have been worth it!"

"You think so?"

"Yes! And I do hope that it will happen like that for you," I told him. "I don't mean the losing it again part. I do hope that you will get everything that you want."

"Yes, so do I," said Captain Holiday, in that rather disconcerting way of his. "But, look here--you seem to be able to tell one so much--supposing it were neither of those two things that you suggest that kept the girl from answering, as I want her to? What about that?"

"Couldn't you," I suggested, "ask her again some time?"

He fingered his small, obstinately-growing moustache.

"That's an idea. Yes. Well! Thanks very much. I'll think about what you've said, Joan."

Joan----!

"By the way, I have decided to call you by your Christian name."

"Oh! Er--yes," I agreed, staggered, but feeling that I could not refuse this proof of goodwill to a young man who had just made me the confidante of so much. "H--How did you know it?"

"Doesn't your little pal call you by it? Mine's Dick, you know."

I nodded, not feeling I could use it just yet. If he'd been as abrupt in his love-making as he was in his making friends, there was some excuse, thought I, for the young woman who kept him waiting for his answer.

Then, with equal brightness, he changed the subject altogether.

"D'you know that I'm having a house-party at the Lodge next week? For the concert--yes. You've seen my wounded pal, haven't you? Then I've got a girl from London and her mother coming down to stay."

"A girl--oh! have you?"

And then I could not help it. The question slipped out, as it were, of its own accord.

"Captain Holiday, is she 'the' girl?"

But the exasperating man wouldn't give me a direct answer.

"The girl," he said with a laugh. "Ah, well, I suppose most girls have got somebody who'd consider they were 'the' girl."

"Yes, yes; but I mean is she the girl you've been talking to me about all this time?"

Again he only laughed, and said something chaffing about "curiosity."

Curiosity indeed! From him! Pretty good, wasn't it? And not another sensible word could I get out of Captain Holiday for the rest of the walk.

When we did finally reach the field, however, from which we could see the corrugated iron roof of our hut set in the trees, he did vouchsafe to me one more remark about the girl who was shortly coming down from London. Just after his salute and "good evening," he turned back to me to say:

"I'll tell you this much: she happens to be my own first cousin."

However, he'd said enough--or left enough unsaid. I knew well enough that, cousin or no cousin, she was the girl about whom there'd been all that discussion.