CHAPTER XX

LAND ARMY TESTS

The discussions of the concert, after it had happened, went on for as many days in our camp as the pre-concert discussions.

I'll skip those. I'll skip the days which suddenly seemed to have "gone flat," with all the thrill gone out of Land-work, for the time being. I'll skip my own broodings--which were those of just any other girl in love with a man who prefers another woman! For since it could not be the "Signora" I concluded that it was Muriel after all.

I'll come to the next excitement in the Land-worker's life--namely, the test-exams.!

You see our time was nearly up at the Practice Farm. Our six weeks' training was drawing to a close. If, at the tests, we gained a certain percentage of marks, Elizabeth and I would be considered "finished pupils," and we would be passed out and sent off.

Where?

Heaven and the Organizing Secretary of the County knew where that job would be found.

I told myself that I only hoped it would be a good long trail away from Careg, away from the farm of bitter-sweet memories.

Vic was instructive on the subject of the changes to come.

"Any people ought to like the look o' you two, now you've shaped to the work," she kindly remarked. "Still, you never know whether looks is going to help a girl or to stand in her way in this world. A nice thing it would be if you was landed like one of the smartest-looking girls I ever saw join up, Chrissie Devon!"

"What happened to her?" I inquired.

"Chrissie was fine with horses," Vic said, "all her people having ridden. She was a clever girl, well educated, and a beautiful figure on horseback. I-T, she was. The secretary got her a job with a brother of our Mr. Rhys, the bailiff, who keeps a lot of horses. Thought it would be just the right thing for her. So it would have. The only thing was, our Mr. Rhys's brother didn't consider himself half-artful. He----"

Vic broke off to laugh.

"He turned up at the station before the one that she was going to, and saw her in the train. And," Vic concluded with an impressive nod, "sent her back to the depot by the next one. Then he strafed our poor little organizing secretary till she didn't dare see him for a year. 'The idea!' says he, 'of sending me a girl that looked like that! Me, a widower. She would be owning the horses and me inside o' six months!'"

"So then," Vic told us, "Chrissie was sent to a very old married couple up in the hills. The old man was about ninety, and the old woman p'raps a shade more juvenile. Chrissie worked her hardest for them. But, if you'll believe me, she didn't give satisfaction there neither. The old woman asked our secretary if she couldn't be removed. And when the secretary asked what was the grouse, it turns out that the old woman was certain that the new Land Girl had taken it into her head that she would be 'his second.' I ask you!"

"And where did she go to next?" Elizabeth asked.

"Chrissie? Oh, now's she going in for motor-tractor driving. She don't stay long enough in one place to put anybody's back up with her fatal beauty. That's the story of her. I wonder what they'll do with you and Mop?"

The day of the tests arrived.

It should have seen the arrival also of the examiner from London. Of this unknown personage we were all, including the gentle giant, Mr. Price, in a state of terror. However, a telegram came to say that this magnate was unable to attend.

His place was taken by the local examiner, who turned out to be that other Mr. Rhys, the widower who had strafed the organizing secretary for sending him a too-good-looking Land Girl. Now he and that secretary, a little bright-eyed Welshwoman who had been a school-marm, had evidently made up their difference.

She, the secretary, had come over to help with the tests, for which we had in the big farmyard an audience that I had not expected. Not only these examiners and the two Prices looked on while I brought in the cows to the stalls and set to work with stool and pail, but also the visitors from the Lodge!

Heavens! how my heart sank into my clumping Land Army boots as I beheld the little procession coming through the red-painted farmyard gate. Captain Holiday, in those disgraceful but becoming grey tweeds of his, was walking with Mrs. Elvey in her smartest toque! Behind them the slim-waisted, uniformed figure of young Colonel Fielding, escorting Muriel Elvey.

"We've come to look on at the tests, if we may," Captain Holiday announced cheerfully to the Prices.

Greetings were exchanged with the ladies, and though I kept my eyes quite steadily upon the work that I had in hand, I could not help seeing Muriel's amused stare and smile, just as I couldn't help hearing her treble twitter to the men of "mustn't it be too quaint to have to wear those clothes and things--and how wonderful not to be afraid of all those great animals--I should be terrified of cows, I know I should."

Indulgent laughter came from all the men. I remembered one of Elizabeth's contemptuous axioms about the sex--"a pretty girl can't be too helpless or too afraid of mice to please a man, even now!"

Elizabeth, at this moment sitting beside the cow, Blodwen, wore her most man-hating looks upon her small, set face. As for me, I felt that now, on this occasion of all others, when, as a Land-worker, I ought to have been at my best, I was absolutely at my worst, nervous, flurried and awkward.

I had a hideous presentiment that I should overturn my milking-pail, or some fiasco of that sort!

Raging inwardly, I approached the black-and-white cow who had become my friend. She was the easiest in the stable, as Mrs. Price had said on that first time of all when I had milked her. But now, to my horror, I realized that she was going to fidget and to be difficult. She was going to "let me down" before all these people!

Suddenly I heard Captain Holiday's voice, not brusque as usual, but quiet.

"I say, Muriel, my child," he said, "stand outside the door, will you? If strangers go and stand close up to the cow when she's being milked she gets bad-tempered and there's no doing anything with her."

"Oh, isn't there? I didn't know. I'm so sorry," said Muriel, airily, and she fluttered out to stand beside Colonel Fielding.

Feeling grateful beyond words to the man who had helped me thus, I went on milking with more assurance. The nervous flurry melted away from me. I succeeded in forgetting that I was doing what I was with a maximum of so many marks for "approach," for "time," for "quantity," for "clean-stripping."

I forgot Mrs. Elvey's lorgnette upon me from the cow-house door; and the eyes of the others, and the chatter of Muriel to the two young men.

I just did the best I could.

Presently Mr. Rhys, the examiner, had taken Elizabeth and me into an empty shed, and, looking doubtfully upon us, began to ask us simple questions as to our everyday work. I was glad to realize that--as is so often the case with the male examiner--he was more nervous than we were. Or did he think that we, too, had designs upon his widowerhood?

At all events, the marks that Mr. Rhys put down upon his papers seemed to be satisfactory.

"Well, after all, I may have squeezed through!" I thought.

And half an hour later Mrs. Price came to Elizabeth and me in the kitchen, where she had insisted upon our having a cup of tea after our labours, and told us that we had both got through our tests with nearly full marks in all subjects.

Pride filled my heart, as you may imagine. Surely it was not an unnatural thing for the thought to flash across me:

"Well, now Captain Holiday will hear that! He'll know that I am not a complete imbecile at my job after all, even if he did go away this afternoon before he saw that I had got over my nervousness!"--for the whole of the Lodge party had disappeared towards the farm before I had begun upon my second cow. "He'll have to think that I am some sort of a credit to him after all the tips he's given me. And perhaps he will say so to Muriel, even if he is in love with her."

And then I put away those thoughts.

As Elizabeth and I tramped back to camp with the glad news that we were now fully fledged Land-workers, I turned resolutely to the future and the new job.

The little organizing secretary had promised to let us know in a day or two what she had settled for us. She had also promised to arrange that Elizabeth and I should be sent somewhere together.

For the meantime we were to stay where we were in camp, as it seemed scarcely worth while to move us to the depot. The secretary said she was almost certain she had got us our job--at a rectory with a farm attached. It was at the other side of the county.

"That's a good thing!" thought I.

I did not say so to Elizabeth. I hadn't confided a word to Elizabeth of what I felt. I had taken my confidence away from the once-intimate chum.

And then suddenly her confidence returned to me; in fact, I had it as I'd never had it before.

It was on the afternoon after we'd passed our tests--Sunday. (On the Monday we were to hear for certain about that new job of ours.) I'd missed Elizabeth shortly after the midday meal, and I found her in that old haunt of hers on the wall under the bushes.

Crouched up there she was sobbing as if her heart would break.

I was afraid she would be furious that I'd come upon her like this.

But the unexpected happened. She turned and clung to me.

"Oh, Joan! I am so unhappy," she sobbed. "Oh, it's so awful. We are going away from this place, and I shall never, never see him again!"