CHAPTER XVIII

THE NIGHT OF THE CONCERT

At last the great day of the long-discussed Concert arrived.

At last the burning question was decided whether we Campites were to attend in uniform or "civvies."

Popular opinion had been in favour of Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. Some girls had wired home to hasten their parcels. The red-haired Welsh timber-girl had been all delight over the prospect of adorning herself in a blouse of rose-pink voile with flowers embroidered in coarse white cotton. How entirely it spoilt her looks! In fact, there was scarcely a girl in that camp who didn't look a thousand times more attractive in uniform than she did in an ordinary hat and frock.

Uniform does manage to be always "right" in a way that only the most successful "other clothes" ever achieve. But only one woman in twenty can ever be persuaded to see that.

Elizabeth and I were highly pleased, however, when the verdict came from the forewoman that uniform was to be worn at the concert after all.

That concert began early, in order to finish early. We should never have time to get back from work, have our tea, and change into civilian clothes before we set out again for the hospital--particularly the gang of timber-workers, who were now in the woods, two miles beyond the training farm. And it wouldn't look nice to have them in uniform and the farm-girls out of it. We must be all alike, decided Miss Easton, and smarten up our working kit by getting into a clean smock and giving our boots an extra polish.

Grumbling broke out--what camp in either the women's or the men's armies could go on without its grouse? But the girls agreed to lump it, as it had to be.

"After all, the boys'll have to be in their everlasting hospital blue, with those chronic red ties o' theirs that I'm getting fair fed up with the sight of, so we'll be fellow-sufferers in distress," pronounced Vic cheerfully as she swallowed her tea, left the table, and then got to work on another pair of brogues.

"After you with that brown boot-polish, young Mop"--to Elizabeth--"and when you've finished with the glass, Peggy, p'raps you'll find me a clean handkerchief, the thieves in this place having pinched the lot of mine. Ho! Why do I talk in this unfemin-nine style? Most unwomanly I call it. Effects of this here life in camp," she rattled on good-humouredly.

"I shall have to mind myself presently, before that refined pal of Celery-face's. Her what's going to play the piano. She didn't half give me a nasty look in the chemist's. Sure she thinks I'm no lady. Now what's her little game? Is she trying to get off with the Captain, Celery-face?"

I said a trifle bitterly:

"If she likes people, she does not have to 'try' for them."

"Ah, is she one o' those lucky ones," said Vic, cheerfully shining her brogues. "Well, I'm going to watch the young lady tonight, and see what she makes of----"

"Hurry up, you girls!" urged Miss Easton from the porch. "The concert starts at a quarter to. It's time we were off!"

* * * * * * *

Well! As Vic said, we were to "see life" that evening at the concert.

The scene was that big comfortable country house transformed into that jolly hospital for the boys from the Front. Its enormous double drawing-room must have witnessed plenty of "county" dinner-parties; dull and formal functions, no doubt. Nothing dull or formal about tonight, now that it was turned into an impromptu music-hall!

The wounded lads buzzed about it like a swarm of blue bees giving an At Home, welcoming the visitors, showing them into the rows of seats set in the lower half of the room.

"Here you are! Land Army to the right!" a cheery voice hailed us as we trooped in--twenty-odd girls in uniform.

It was Peggy's sergeant who greeted us. His hair was varnished brighter than the parquet floor; he wore the largest rose I have ever seen in his button-hole, and the gaudiest lucky golliwog decorated his red tie.

"I was to reserve these seats for you young ladies. The best, of course!" he beamed upon us. "Stalls this way, if you please. Peggy, you sit at the end of the row so that you can pop out quick in the interval."

"I'm astonished at you," came a Timber-girl's retort as we settled into our seats and looked about the bright, crowded place.

The farther end was occupied by the stage platform with the piano set near the wings. A curtain had been made of what looked like all the spare quilts in the house.

Standing in front of this (as I saw directly we came in) was our host, Captain Holiday.

Evening-dress made him taller and different, both from the smart soldier he was in khaki and the country sportsman he seemed in those dilapidated tweeds of his. Suddenly he seemed a stranger again to me. It chilled me.

He was talking to one of the soldiers, a red-haired Blue Boy, with a good-looking, clean-cut, actor-ish face. I heard Captain Holiday saying:

"Righto! I'll tell the Colonel to let you fix him up. That's in the second part."

"Yes, sir," said the red-haired boy.

Captain Holiday, looking down the room caught sight of our party. I heard him give an "Ah." He smiled, nodding at me. This was somehow cheering after that slight chill. He made a movement forward, I think--I'm sure he was coming to speak to me.

But at that moment a pretty, coquettish voice called "Dick!"

And there entered, by a door nearer the stage, Muriel Elvey and her mother. Mrs. Elvey, the sort of mother who never is anything but an adequate "background" to her daughters, looked placid and pleased in well-fitting black, with diamonds.

As for Muriel, she was lovely, yes, lovely! in her Frenchiest little frock of pinks and mauves, and mingled heliotropes. The girlish, low-cut bodice of it had no sleeves, and was held up over her white shoulders by strings of palest coral beads. She was a vision such as Careg had never seen. No wonder the Blue Boys gazed! No wonder the Land Girls, in their clean but coarse overalls, bent forward and studied her with the rapturous, envying sighs they would have heaved over some exquisite fashion-plate! No wonder that she was followed by a slim masculine shape in black-and-white that was Colonel Fielding.

He, too! No wonder, indeed, that her cousin, Captain Holiday, was at Muriel's side in an instant, bending his dark head over her golden one, with its fillet of coral-pink buds.

Now, curiously enough perhaps, that sight spoilt the whole first part of the concert for me.

At first I didn't know why. Such was my incredible self-deception that I gave myself quite the wrong reason for the fact that Muriel Elvey came between me and any enjoyment of the playlet "Poached Eggs and Pearls," excellently acted by a company of nurses and wounded. I was beset, I told myself, by the promptings of jealous memory.

I pictured that golden, rose-filleted head of Muriel's close to another dark head. Harry's! That was what I couldn't help thinking of. I watched Muriel--the centre of all eyes as she sat at the piano--and I realized what she'd meant to Harry. Not a thought had he had for me after that evening when I introduced him to her. And now history was repeating itself. Now Captain Holiday hadn't a look for anybody else.

It hurt.

Oh! Not the Captain Holiday part, of course! I assured myself hastily--the other. I'd thought I was getting over that. How queer are the workings of that most painful passion--jealousy! Brooding, I sat there with my mates, enjoying themselves on each side of me. I laughed with the others, with the others I watched the stage, and clapped when the curtain fell--to Muriel's music--for the end of the first part.

Then Captain Holiday, still standing by Muriel at the piano, called out:

"There will now be an interval of fifteen minutes! War-time refreshments will be found in the dining-room."

So, with a scraping aside of chairs and a babel of voices, the audience surged out of the "theatre." I went with the others. But that black mood of mine had swept my mind away out of my new and joyous country life, back to the bad old days of London after Harry left.

I sat on a big chair near the door, and watched.

Each Land Girl had found a wounded soldier or two to attend to her. Vic, with Elizabeth under her wing, was the centre of a group of blue. Then a long glass of lemonade was brought to me by the pleasant-faced, red-haired lad I had noticed with Captain Holiday. He talked to me in a gentle, but curious, voice, husky, yet high-pitched. For he told me he'd been shot through the lungs.

"Done me in for the profession if I go back after the war," he said cheerfully. "Spoilt my singing voice." He told me he'd been on the stage from the time he was ten until he joined the Army in 1914.

Here Sergeant Syd, coming up to us with an arm through Peggy's, broke into the conversation.

"Yes, and you'd have been all right, you silly blighter, if you'd have stayed where they wanted to keep you, down at the base singing to the boys in rest camp. You needn't ever have left there! But no. He would go up the line, Miss."

The red-haired actor warrior agreed in the husky voice that was spoilt for song:

"I wanted to go up the line. After all, I didn't join to go on singing."

Another aspect of life: the obscurely heroic that is taken for granted every day!

"Corporal Ferrant," said a voice at his elbow. It was Muriel again.

"Oh, will you go to the Colonel's room now?" she said pleasantly. "He's ready for you to make him up." Then:

"Hullo, Joan!" she said. "What do you think of this priceless show? My hands are dropping off with playing so hard."

She glanced around. Then she let herself down lightly on the arm of my chair as if she wanted to say something particular to me.

"I say," she said, with a sudden little shrewd glance at me. "Wasn't it funny about Harry Markham?"

"Funny?" I echoed, startled. "What--which was funny?"

Muriel, adjusting her pink shoulder strap, answered:

"Oh, just his getting brought back to Blighty again after he'd had only three weeks in Salonika!"

Harry? In England? The first I'd heard of it. Yes; naturally she'd know and I shouldn't. But it was bitter!

"Apparently the General can't do without him," she went on. "I expect Harry's jolly glad to get back to London. I had a note this morning from him; forwarded. Of course he tore up to see me as soon as he arrived."

"Of course he would!" said I, with quite a successful laugh.

Muriel, watching my face, said:

"I expect you know I saw a lot of him after that night you introduced him at 'Romance'----"

"Oh, I knew." Didn't I! I nodded quite cheerfully at this pretty, prosperous girl who had written that letter to me in the spring.

Through the confused chatter of the crowded room Muriel spoke confidentially.

"He---- Well, between ourselves, he went absolutely mad about me, you know. Proposed and proposed----"

"Really," said I, with another composed nod. Every word drove straight into my heart. Harry had proposed. Several times! Were they actually engaged, then?

I was too proud to ask, but how I wanted to know!

"He's quite nice," Muriel remarked critically. "Quite good-looking. Quite amusing to go out with. One enjoyed Harry's taking one out. But marrying him might be another matter; because----"

Here she stopped. The stage-bell was ringing. People began to scramble past us out of the room.

"I must go," cried Muriel. "The second part's beginning now."

But I held on to an end of her mauve sash.

"Wait----!" I said.

I felt I must know about Harry. "Because," she said--and stopped. Did it mean because she meant to marry her cousin? I simply must find out, for Captain Holiday's sake. Remember, I still believed she must be the girl of whom he'd told me "she hasn't said 'Yes' or 'No' to me yet." She must mean "Yes," I thought excitedly.

I kept close to her as we moved out of the doorway.

"Do tell me, Muriel," I urged, "what you were going to!"

She laughed, enjoying her power to tease.

"Oh, you want to know if I am going to be engaged to Harry or not?"

"You said 'not.'"

"No, I didn't. I simply said marrying him might--only 'might'--be another matter."

"Yes, yes," I agreed hurriedly, "but why?"

Muriel's answer was not one I should have dreamt of hearing from her.

Tilting her fair head, she smiled over her white shoulder and said:

"Oh, well! Because, after all, he isn't a gentleman, is he?"

This remark was a shock to me.

Harry Markham--"not a gentleman--" To hear Muriel say it!

Just because Harry's father, that self-made man, hadn't "made" himself in time to send his son to a public school? Didn't that seem rather like ... well, hideous snobbery?

Further, for a girl to let a man take her out to the theatre, the opera--for her to accept innumerable dinners and taxi-drives from him, and then for her to sum him up to another girl as "not a gentleman"--didn't it sound like ... to put it kindly, ill-breeding?

It surprised me so from Muriel because after all she was a lady!

But----

Would any girl who was a gentlewoman at heart have been guilty of such a remark?

And did Captain Holiday, who also--as I believed--wanted to marry Muriel--did he know that she was the sort of girl who would say such a thing?

I was resentfully wondering over that as the pink and mauve figure of Muriel slipped back to her seat at the piano. I returned to my chair next to Sybil, and the second part of the soldiers' concert began.

Now the opening item was a clog-dance by a merry-faced, one-armed Lancashire Fusilier. It was good; but I could not fix any attention on the stage just then.

Was Muriel going to marry Captain Holiday, who had now drawn up a chair close beside hers at the piano? Or did she mean after all to take Harry? Which? Which? Did she know herself, yet?

And--here an odd thought came to me as those clogs pattered faster than a shower of summer rain--did I myself know which of those two young men I least wanted Muriel to marry?

"Clicketty clicketty clack clack!" went the clogs on the stage; I watched, with the others, while the light twinkling feet within them danced on and on.

I was thinking all the while. Of course it would break my heart if I saw that pretty girl at the piano actually married to the man she had already poached. Yes, of course it would, I told myself resolutely; but at the bottom of my heart I was stifling a mad little imp of an idea. This whispered:--

"You wouldn't mind if Muriel married Harry now. Although it was a stab, it wasn't a deep one. Don't pretend! For you are really through with Harry. It is not about Harry that you are worrying any more!"

--Ah! Now I was getting nearer the truth. I was coming to it, coming... But I still told myself it was Harry whose engagement would hurt me. Why should I mind if----

Here a storm of applause broke out all round me. It was the end of the clog-dance, but in the midst of the din I went on revolving my own little problem.

I told myself that, of course, it was comparatively nothing to me if Muriel chose to marry this devoted cousin of hers, Captain Holiday. He (I considered, personally) was rather too good for her. Still, most other people would consider that no man could be too good for a girl as lovely as Muriel Elvey.

Anyhow, it was no business of mine. Who was I? Merely a Land Girl, sunburnt and coarsely clothed, a worker in training at a farm on Captain Holiday's estate. Why should I care twopence about this whole question? I didn't care. Of course, I didn't care.

Here Sybil, who had secured a programme, leant over me to look at mine. The next item read: "Song: 'Until!' by Sergeant Sydney Escott."

"Ah," said Vic, with feeling, "now we are going to hear something. Eh, Peggy?"

All the Land Girls were leaning towards the smallest Timber Girl, chaffing and smiling encouragement. Peggy, to whom this was "the" item of the programme, popped a piece of toffee into her mouth, and assumed a look as if she had never heard the singer's name before.

But just as we expected to see her sweetheart jump up on to the platform, one of the other blue-coated, red-cravated boys came up in answer to a nod from Captain Holiday, bearing under his arm a large cardboard placard. This he put up, carefully, in the number-stand at the side of the piano. The word upon it in large scarlet letters was "Extra."

Everybody in the hall murmured it aloud. Vic's carrying voice rose above all the others.

"'Extra'? Now what's this goin' to be? Surprise turn, eh?" she said.

She was right.

With an arresting jerk it brought me out of the mood in which I was beginning to forget that there was a concert going on about me at all. It brought me straight back to where I was, in the entertainment hall of Captain Holiday's Hospital, in the middle of a crowd of eager, enjoying people.

Truly it was to be a startler to me, the surprise turn that came on next!