CHAPTER XVII

LAND-GIRLS GO SHOPPING

"Quand on n'a pas ce qu'on aime, il faut aimer ce qu'on a." --FRENCH PHILOSOPHER.

A few days after I had been wondering what Captain Holiday's "the" girl would be like, my curiosity was gratified.

I met her!

This was how it occurred:

I was out in "the town" shopping--fascinating occupation--don't any woman's eyes brighten at its name?

Yes.... But the chances are ten to one against her knowing anything about the Careg Land Girl's Camp version of the function.

Not for us the dear delights of window-gazing, of comparing prices and textures in one big, temptingly set-out establishment after another.... Well, we got our delight in another way.

Shopping for the girls was a game of chance and skill, I can tell you. It "combined all the charm of novelty with that of big game-hunting!" as Vic put it. It meant diving into the funniest little caves of shops, all garlanded by festoons of such different kinds of goods as picture post-cards, hanks of darning cotton, and onions.

It sometimes included vaulting over the counter ourselves, and helping dear old ladies to forage for what we wanted in a wilderness of cardboard boxes at the back of the shop. And even after our search it generally meant that we went on our way disappointed, to the accompaniment of such remarks as "No, indeed, I'm very sorry! I'm sold out of every bit"--of whatever it was we wanted--"and I don't know when I shall ever see any! It's the war, yes, yes! I haven't got a ha'porth of nothing of the sort, not in the whole place!"

This seemed to be the keynote of supplies in the town, late on that very wet Saturday afternoon when I had accompanied Vic, and Peggy, the tiny Timber-girl, to do the shopping for the rest of our camp.

"Got the list, Celery-face?" said Vic. As we sheltered for a moment in an archway I pulled out the long list of commissions which our colleagues had drawn up for us.

Optimists! They really thought we could get these things for them in "the town"!

I read aloud.

"Last two numbers of _The Tatler_." (I expect the latest number they've got at the station here is April 1, Nineteen Five.)

"Pot of lemon-marmalade; you could get it at Morris's. (I don't think.)

"Sybil wants jasmine soap, 1_s_. 3_d_." (Why not the moon?)

"Two skeins of floss embroidery silk, deep cream or nearest." (The nearest is Regent Street, I expect.)

"Reel of black cotton, No. 40, packet needles, No. 9's, brown shoe-laces, broad." (All asked for, and none to be had.)

"Shocking!" was Vic's cheery verdict. "As for the packets of grey square envelopes for Miss Easton, nothing doing--and there was I pinning my faith to them having a good line in salvage stock left over from the Ark, this being the last place where the Flood stopped--not that it ever has really stopped in Wales, if you ask me."

"Oh, that eternal joke about the weather in Wales!" I laughed. "Just as if it didn't rain much harder in plenty of other places! Have you ever stayed in Surrey, by the way? _That's_ where it never leaves off!"

"It 'ud have a job to beat this beauty-spot today," persisted Vic, winking the rain from her lashes. "Look at it!"

It certainly was a soaking wet afternoon, Wales running Surrey a good second for once.

For it certainly was a soaking wet afternoon! The clouds were a blanket of indigo, from which the rain poured in millions of white streams, hissing on to the narrow, little, slate-paved street, all shiny with puddles. Tossing the drops from the brim of my Land Army hat, I went on reading the list of ordinary every-day things which we Land Girls in the damp depths of that wilderness found as hard to come by as gold!

I read.

"'Gramophone needles.' (No earthly.)

"'Dri-ped for Curley's boots. (No.) 'Tin of toffee.' (No.) 'Sticking-plaister.' (No.) 'Oranges.' (What are they?) 'Writing-pad.' (Bagged the last.) 'Shampoo-powder, any decent sort that smells nice----'"

"Aha. Who's wanting to make her hair smell nice all of a sudden?" demanded Peggy with interest. "I'm astonished at her! Who is it?"

"Don't know," I fibbed valiantly--for I knew perfectly. It was young Elizabeth who had begun to want to minister to that thick, soft hair-crop of hers in this way.... A sign of the times! That fixed it, surely? I exchanged a soulful though still half-credulous glance with the nearest cottage-window, blank with rain.

"I haven't tried Mr. Lloyd, the only chemist's, for that yet," I went on. "Shall we go on and see if he's ever heard of such a thing?"

Cramming the list into my pocket, we set out again down that river of a street.

The chemist's shop was at the other end of it.

And as we splashed down the street we had a little adventure of the kind that had probably occurred to more than one set of land girls.

A group of lads who encountered us began to laugh and jeer at our uniform--they themselves were in "civvies," mackintosh and caps. Farmers' lads from remote places in the mountains!

I don't know what they said, but from the tone it was obviously not complimentary.

So feeling that blank discomfort which falls upon the average girl at any man's incivility, I found myself clutching Peggy's arm in order to hurry past, and saying hastily: "Come on, Vic----"

But Vic, to my horror, had paused.

She left my side. She took a step towards the nearest of the lads, a rosy-faced nineteen-year-old with a ragged thatch of black hair showing under his bowler hat. There she stood, firmly planted on the streaming road, handsome head well up in the rain, figure held proudly erect, and she demanded in a voice that rang:

"What's that you're saying about us?" A sheepish giggle from the group; not one of the boys spoke.

"You were saying we ought to be ashamed of ourselves, wasn't it? Something like that, eh? That's what you think of us, is it?" Vic went on.

"I'd like just to tell you what we Land Army girls think of you!" Vic announced. "And that is, that it's you who ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Huh! Why aren't you in France? Can't leave the farm, you can't. You're sheltering yourselves behind the land, you are. You ought to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the rest o' the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

"You've got regiments. Nobody can say they don't fight all right. Yet here you are at home. Exemption, eh? Indispensables--I don't think. Who's to milk father's cows? Well, we've volunteered to do that. That's what we're here for. That's why you can't bear to see us about the place. You're afraid----"

Mutters from the boys here.

"Yes, you're afraid that when it's shown that we girls can do most o' your work you'll be pushed out after all!" went on the relentless Vic. "So you try and bring a bad name on the Land Army, you little blighters, who take jolly good care you aren't in any army at all! You make game of our uniform, you that haven't a suit o' khaki among the lot of you! Nice ones you are to talk!"

Here there was an uneasy movement in the enemy's ranks.

Skulking little wretches! There are some of these in every place, town or country--the dregs of a noble race whose cream was taken first of all. Probably as soon as our backs were turned they would have wheeled round and begun to shout after us again. But this Vic did not mean to allow. She kept her face turned squarely on the retreat.

She called out after them:

"Making fun, were you, because we girls wear the breeches? A good job for the country that we do! As for you, it's a pity they can't take and make you," raising her voice to a shout, "wear petticoats!"

They were now out of ear-shot, so she turned, flushed and triumphant.

"I'm astonished at you," Peggy launched her favourite dictum reproachfully, as we plodded on in the wet. "I wouldn't stoop to answer back a lot of louts like that. I wouldn't speak to 'em."

"Daresay you wouldn't," retorted Vic, good-humouredly, "but if we were all as jolly dignified as you and Celery-face here, those Cuthberts would go through the rest of their natch never knowing what a decent girl thought of 'em! So I thought I might as well demean myself to tell them off proper just for once in a way!"

With which conclusion we found ourselves just outside the tiny chemist's shop. A dog-cart was drawn up there--little did I suspect at that moment who had driven in it! I only noticed that it was occupied by a little stable-boy who did odd jobs about the Lodge for Captain Holiday.

Well, in we all three clumped to the shop with coloured globes and show-cards and dangling bunches of "baby's-comforters" and sponges of Victorian date. And here there met our astonished eyes that figure that was so utterly and entirely uncharacteristic of "the town," or of anything at all in the country round about it!

It was a girl, in an ultra-smart, white and black rubber rain-coat, with a small black and white rain-hat set at an indescribably French angle on her head. Our first glimpse of her, as she stood with her back to us and her face to the obviously paralysed little Welsh chemist, gave us the impression of some slim and elegant magpie who had flown in there to shelter from the rain.

She was speaking. Her high-pitched, clear drawl seemed to belong to Bond Street.

"But d'you mean to say you don't keep any of Roget et Collet's things?"

Then, as we Land girls came clumping and dripping in, she turned with a little stare that seemed to say, "What figures of fun have we here?"

Our rainy-day kit is scarcely dainty. That brown Board of Agriculture mackintosh with the flappy cape-sleeves seemed to amuse the pretty townified girl.

Ravishingly pretty she was in her small-mouthed, big-eyed, Lily-Elsie style with an authentic curl twisting in front of her pink ear, and eyelashes to which the rain-drops hung. How perfectly suited, too, by the costly simple "rightness" of her clothes. Girl and "get-up" composed a type one would scarcely have expected to see here.

The last person I expected to see--for I had seen her before!

With my second good hard look at this fashionable vision I recognized her.

"Hul-lo! You here? It is you, isn't it!" I exclaimed.

She opened her eyes at me, while Peggy and Vic stood by in amazement that this chic magpie apparition should be known to me.

I hadn't been mistaken, even though I could not imagine what should bring her here of all places in the world. It was she all right.

It was Muriel Elvey, the girl who had taken Harry from me!

Muriel opened her big eyes even more widely upon me.

"Good gracious! Is it? Yes, it's Joan Matthews! How priceless!" she exclaimed in that pretty drawl of hers. She glanced from me to the other two Land Girls and back again. "Of course! How d'you do?"

Here she extended her small, perfectly-gloved hand towards my sunburnt paw, that I saw for the first time was irremediably roughened by farm work.

I saw that Miss Muriel took in this and every other detail of my appearance, while she went on gaily:

"Isn't this too funny? The last person I'd ever dreamt of seeing! Of course, I'd heard you'd gone on the land, Joan, or something quaint like that----"

"Why 'quaint'?" thought I, while the same thought showed on the faces of my two mates.

"But I didn't know at all which bit of 'the land' it was supposed to be," concluded Muriel. "Isn't it appallingly hard work? Can you stand it? It would kill me," she went on. She always could chatter nineteen to anybody else's dozen. "I get fearfully done up, with my own war work."

"I didn't know you did any."

"Oh, dear, yes. I go round to no end of hospitals in town and play the piano to the men. They adore it," declared Muriel. "Only the nurses are such cats! Women never can be decent to me, somehow I had a fiendish row with one ward-sister--all jealousy on her part, of course. I simply came away. But what a place to come away to, isn't it?" She gave a tiny grimace about the musty village shop, and towards the glimpse of streaming wilderness outside. "And imagine my meeting you here!"

I spoke up.

"Well, but imagine meeting you! I thought you were never to be seen away from London or some civilized seaside town? What brings you to Careg?"

For even yet the whole situation hadn't broken upon me. Only, I was sore and ruffled, and utterly upset by this meeting with Muriel.

It was opening an old wound. I'd thought I'd forgotten. But, brought face to face with this girl for whom Harry had left me before he sailed, my heart throbbed as painfully as it had on that ghastly morning when I'd got that note to say he'd gone.

Now I wondered with a stab if she were actually engaged to him? I hadn't heard that she was.

She, the unexpected one, gave a pleased little laugh.

"What brought me to Wales?" Muriel replied. "You may well ask, my dear. I was positively dragged down here. Pestered out of my life to come! By a man, of course. No!"--laughing again--"you needn't look as if you thought it must be a romance. He is merely a cousin. My cousin Dick Holiday----"

"What--?" I echoed, thoroughly petrified by this. Her cousin? He was Muriel's cousin? He, who had been talking to me of "the" girl--and who had allowed me to leap to the conclusion that she and the girl-cousin who was coming down to stay were one and the same person! Violently I had leapt to that conclusion. Quite violently, in my haste, I thought now:

"Oh! The man-snatcher! She took my Harry. Now she's annexed Captain Holiday. She takes everybody!"

"I promised him I'd come down with mother and play the piano for his soldiers and things at some priceless concert or other that he's giving," Muriel Elvey went on. "His big place down here is turned into a hospital, you know. That is," with a glance at my muddy boots and uniform, "I don't suppose you've met him, of course, but he's----"

"What, Captain Holiday?" Vic broke in, unaddressed and heartily. "Not met the gent what's giving the concert? Met him? Huh! I should shay sho!"

Muriel, with an indescribable stiffening of her pretty, well-turned-out figure, stared up at the big Cockney Land Girl who thus accosted her.

Vic leaned against the counter, beaming. She might have stood for the symbolical figure of Young Democracy, gazing tolerantly down upon costly Convention.

"All us girls'll be turning up at Captain Holiday's concert," Vic told her. "It's going to be some beano, I give you my word. So you're going to oblige, too, are you? See you then!" She gave a little nod, and turned to the chemist who had been listening with the concentration of a male gossip to every syllable of this conversation.

"Now, Mr. Lloyd! What about this shampoo powder we've heard so much about? ... What's in that box, there, to the right? ... There we are! Egg and lemon--and very nice, too. Sixpence? Right! Good-bye-e-e-e!"

Vic marshalled us out of the shop with a friendly grin divided between the chemist and Muriel Elvey, who was left standing there--utterly pole-axed, I am sure by this glimpse of the sort of companionship into which one was launched when one joined the Land Army.

I could see that she found Vic "too impossible for words!"

This hurt me for my messmate and pal, though I am convinced Vic knew little and cared less about the fact that she had just been looked upon as a young female hooligan! I tramped back along the "puddlesome" roads to camp in a state of mind that I had not known since I'd shaken the dust of London off my feet in the spring.

Still "minding" so dreadfully about Muriel Elvey and Harry?

Why be surprised because men fell like ninepins before her expensively-shod feet? Yet I was astonished. Not at Harry. At that other man for whom she was "the" girl--or so I'd convinced myself.

Surely, though, Captain Holiday should have been the exception to the rule that men adore the Muriel type?

Yes; I'd made up mental pictures of this girl of whom he'd talked without mentioning her name.

To think that the girl he wanted could be a Muriel!

She was the girl of whom one couldn't think without setting her in the background of restaurant-lights, hothouse flowers and Bond Street dressmakers.

When one saw Muriel, one saw always her "things": Muriel and her pearl-string; Muriel and her gold-mesh purse with tiny powder-box and lip-stick attached; Muriel and her mauve leather dressing-case; Muriel and her ivory manicure-set.

Each was a lure, each was a mesh of the net for a man like my lost admirer Harry.... His people were now exceedingly well-off, but there had been no luxury in his boyhood, which, as he'd told me, had been passed in a bleak little house behind the shop where the money had been made, penny by penny, to give him his chance.

At twenty-five, luxury was still rather a new delight to him. He could not take it for granted, poor darling; he who had never seen his mother with any "pretty" things of her own. Hence the reaction. He loved a woman to have "possessions." He adored her to "fuss" incessantly about her nails and skin and hair.

But Captain Holiday, I thought, liked such different things!

Him one couldn't think of without a background of out-of-doors; woods, mountain, field--and perhaps a manure-heap with a Land Girl working there.

And now (so I persuaded myself) he had become infatuated with and wanted to marry a boudoir-type of girl, who hated to go out in a wind!

Ah, the tricks that are played by the charm of Contrast! ... and why should I feel sore about them?