CHAPTER XXVI

COLONEL FIELDING DISCUSSES "LOVE AND THE LIKE"

"'Tis Love breeds love in me, and cold disdain Kills that again."--DONNE.

With the morning we had pulled ourselves together again. Not a word did Elizabeth address to me on the subject of our having met my old love in attendance on Muriel. Not a syllable did I say to her about the object of her own misplaced affections, that finished and unscrupulous flirt, that philanderer more accomplished than Harry--Colonel Fielding. The name of Captain Holiday was not mentioned. In fact, there might not have been "such a thing as young men" in our world that morning.

A wet morning it had turned out! Hay-culling would be out of the question. This we knew even before we scrambled into our brown Land Army mackintoshes and splashed away down the road.

Elizabeth congratulated herself on the nice dry indoor job that would be hers, for Mrs. Price was going to let us take turns at helping her on baking-day, and this was the turn of my chum.

As for me, I found that I should also be kept out of the wet. My morning's work was in the big shearing-shed, turning the shearing-machine for Ivor, the shepherd. He held down the fat lambs on a wooden bench set on the great black floor-sheet of tarpaulin, and went slowly and methodically to work with a sort of twelve-pointed clipping-knife over the body of the lamb, while I turned the big red wheel with its belt and pipe attached to the knife. It was not hard work, but quite soothing--rather like knitting!

And I was at this occupation when I had a visitor, brought in by Mr. Price. It was none other than young Colonel Fielding, who asked diffidently whether he might take a turn and give a hand either to Ivor or Miss Matthews.

Ivor, a blond, quiet man in a dark-blue linen coat, looked up and smiled benignantly upon this slim young officer. Ivor had no English, Mr. Price explained, but he understood pretty well everything else. Especially everything about sheep.

"Then--er--you're lucky to have had him turned down by the doctor, and to be able to keep him on the farm," said Colonel Fielding.

"Oh, he would make a very poor soldier," was the Welsh farmer's verdict. "Very reserved man; very reserved indeed!"

Ivor smiled again as the lamb upon which he had been operating dropped the last of his heavy coat upon the sheet and, shaven, shorn, and freed at last, scrambled out into the adjoining shed.

The shepherd seized another struggling and woolly one, downed him into his place, and took up the shearing-knife once more.

"Now," he said in Welsh, with a little nod to me, and I continued to work the wheel.

Mr. Price in his oilskin coat had stepped out again into the rain. Colonel Fielding did not go with him. He unfastened his brown, trench-worn mackintosh, threw it on one of the big wool-sacks, and took a pace nearer to me and my wheel.

I wondered if he had expected to see Elizabeth in the shed. Taking absolutely no notice of him I worked on.

"Let me have a turn, won't you?" came the meek voice of the intruder--for I felt, as I never had with Captain Holiday, that an intruder he was. "You take a rest, Miss Matthews."

"Thank you, I am not in the least tired." I said it coldly. I thoroughly disapproved of this young man who had been trifling with Elizabeth's feelings.

Elizabeth, bless her, was too good to be at the mercy of this young scamp with his D.S.O. and his subtle way of flirting so that you could hardly nail it down and say that it was flirting at all. Elizabeth had said hard things of Harry, in the days of my infatuation for him. But she hadn't thought any harder things of him than I thought now of this slender-waisted ruffian with the moustache that looked as if a pinch of light-gold paint had been rubbed on to his upper lip.

Cruel hard lines that he should turn out to be the one and only exception to Elizabeth's rule of hating men!

In his meekest of voices he said:

"Perhaps you are not tired. But why are you so--er--poisonously angry with me?"

Before I could reply he answered, still meekly, his own question.

"You loathe me because you think I've been heartlessly flirting with your little friend."

I stared!

He smiled deprecatingly.

"Oh, yes!" he continued, "women think it takes a woman to spot those things. But--er--I knew. Now I'll tell you--er--something."

He glanced towards that "reserved" man, the shepherd.

"No English, eh?" he broke off. "I wish no servants knew any! By Jove, how it would simplify life for a lot of people----"

"But what did you want to tell me?" I said crossly.

"Just this," replied Colonel Fielding, with his most deceptive, most shrinking bashfulness. "I'm going to marry your little friend, Miss Weare."

"To marry Miss Weare?"

You can imagine how I stared afresh at this. In fact, I stopped turning the wheel.

Deftly taking the handle from me, Colonel Fielding began turning it in my place rhythmically, easily. I stood there beside him, watching him blankly.

I remembered Elizabeth's forlorn mood of last night. I went back to her, as I'd seen her this morning, turning to the kitchen, where she was to help Mrs. Price bake. Her small face under its thick crop had been set with the determination to let work drive away trouble. For trouble, I knew, had been as heavy at her heart as it was at my own. Then was all that altered already?

"What!" I exclaimed. "You've seen her this morning?"

His eyes under their long lashes did not leave the turning-wheel. He only said gently:

"No, I haven't seen her this morning."

"But----" I exclaimed. I knew he could not have seen her last night after we got back to camp.

"You haven't even asked her yet?" I said.

"No," he agreed. "I haven't asked her yet." And he went on turning that big red wheel as if he were a Fate in khaki. After half a dozen turns he added, "But I am going to marry her, for all that."

Rebukefully I said, "You mean you're going to marry her if she'll have you?"

"She will have me," he said gently, but firmly. He blushed a little, but the girlish blushes that this young man went in for never seemed to make the faintest difference to his cheek--in another sense. "She'll have me. I know that."

"How do you know that?" I retorted, sitting there on that sack, and hardly knowing whether I were more glad on Elizabeth's account, or more indignant or more puzzled by this young man of hers.

He answered: "I know, because I know the--er--the kind of man I am myself." ... Here he looked up, shyly, from that wheel, and said, "Miss Matthews, you think I'm--er--the last word in fatuous conceit."

I was thinking so. How could I help it after what he had just said?

"Er--I'd hate you to think that. You are her pal. I--er--owe you an explanation. Please forgive me if I talk to you for a bit just about myself----"

I put in "That's a thing all men do."

"Yes. But--er--all men don't ask you to forgive them first, do they?" he said very quickly. "Generally they yarn on and on and on, imagining a woman must be jolly interested to hear it. They don't realize that the woman (unless she happens to be wildly in love with them), the woman's--er--mostly thinking of something miles away all the time!"

I couldn't help smiling. To hear a man himself say such a thing! It sounded more like something Elizabeth herself might give out.

He said, "You have forgiven me? Well, I'll tell you why I know Miss Weare will have me. If she were not attracted enough for that, I should not be attracted. You see I am talking--er--quite frankly; no camouflage at all. Unless a girl liked me, I shouldn't begin to seek her. Not after the first look. I must be liked," he said very simply and with that blush, but very definitely, "I must feel that I am wanted."

He seemed to me extraordinary, from what I knew of men. I said, "But, Colonel Fielding, men always prefer a girl who doesn't seem to want to have anything to say to them! They say men want the chase!"

"I can't help a lot of the silly conventional things people say," he declared blandly. "Er--I suppose those things are true enough about people who are all alike, like a flock of sheep." Here he nodded towards the lamb which had just sprung out of Ivor's hands, and had made off to join his shorn brethren. "But I say--er--what I feel myself."

I looked at him doubtfully, the graceful creature whom I personally could not admire.

He said, "It wouldn't amuse me to try to make--er--love to anybody unless I felt that it would amuse them too, and--er--delight them!"

I objected, "But that's a woman's point of view."

"Why only a woman's?" asked the young soldier mildly, turning his wheel. "I learnt it from my mother. The woman's view! I find it useful to look at--er--Love and the like. '_Two things greater than all things are, the first is Love and the next is War._' The average man has made good on War, these last four years. But--er--I don't listen to him much on Love."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't think the average man makes a success of it," declared this puzzling creature coolly. "Give a kid of two a violin to play; what? I think he (the average man) could learn plenty from the average woman--on that one subject. It's with her my sympathies are, Miss Matthews.... Of course I talk too much.... And now you'll call me effeminate."

His face wore a mask of harmless politeness with a gleam behind his lashes as I looked at him. Effeminate? With that striped ribbon on his breast, with his colonelcy at twenty-six, with all the praise and devotion of his men? These things are not won by effeminates.

He was a man all right, even if he did say and think things which we imagine are exclusively feminine. He was a puzzling exception. And even if he were the kind of man whom I could never have loved I was beginning to like him.

Without replying to his remark about effeminacy, I smiled and got up.

"Let me take a turn," I said.

I took the handle of the wheel from him and began to work. He sat down on the wool-sack that I had left. And even as we changed places something else changed between us.

He realized it, as I did.

"We shall be friends now," he said very quickly and gently.

"Yes," I nodded.

"They say--your dear 'They'!--that there's no such thing as Platonic friendship. Here's the one exception," he told me. "Where all the Love goes elsewhere. You know you think I'm utterly unattractive. But you want to listen to me. As a matter of fact, you'll never talk to a _fiancé_, Miss Matthews, as freely as you'll talk to me."

"Never," I agreed.

"Nor shall I ever jaw like this, to Elizabeth." ... He broke off and said affectionately, "You're such a pal to her!"

"She is to me."

"I know," he said. "I knew it before I saw you two girls. It spoke out of her letters to me from the flat. You know, when I got her letters, I--er--wanted to see her!"

"They were mostly about the kitchen sink," I said, laughing.

"Yes, that's what she told me when I told her she put herself into her letters," said the man whom we had called "the old Colonel" in those days. "Somehow I made up my mind that this girl I'd never seen would be different from--er--most girls. I came down here, you know, to look. And then--when I caught sight of her by that cart in the field--looking such a little picture!--I could have caught her up then and there!"

"I wonder you weren't discouraged; she was chilling enough that morning!"

"No," he denied. "I felt she didn't mean that. That was just the first minute when she had realized I was that distasteful creature a man, and yet that she didn't dislike the look of me."

"Ah! She's told you she hates men."

"Yes, we've had all that," he admitted, "and I explained to her that I ought to understand, because, as a rule, I don't like girls."

Here I lifted my head and looked severely at this humbug.

"You? Not like girls!" I exclaimed.

"Not usually," he persisted, smiling at me. "I think they're too little."

"Little? But you are in love with Elizabeth. And Elizabeth's tiny!"

"Elizabeth," he repeated, and I heard him give a little laugh of delight over the name of the beloved. "Elizabeth has a heart as big as the earth! I was--er--talking of hearts, natures, minds. So often girls make me feel their minds are rather narrow," confessed this odd type of woman-hater.

"Petty, you know," he went on. "Saying--er--things about other women--oh, brrrr! Spiteful to their own sex. Then being decent and jolly enough with--er--us. _That_ puts me off; by Jove, nothing worse! I can say all this to you, Miss Matthews. You're different; like her. But lots of girls make me feel they--they---- Well, not enough cold tub!" he wound up ingenuously, "and too much face-powder!"

The last words brought a certain image into my mind; exquisitely-dressed, scented, powdered Muriel!

Thinking of yesterday, I said to the young man, "You're very severe on girls, but I saw you when you were flirting outrageously with one--no, not with Elizabeth. With Miss Elvey."

"To see if it annoyed Elizabeth!" he admitted, so frankly that I had to laugh over my work.

I said: "Now that was feminine enough! That was 'little'! Anybody would have imagined that you were very much attracted. In fact, I thought you were."

"Attracted? To Miss Elvey?" he cried out as if I'd said something too wildly improbable. "I? To her? Of all the girls on this earth?"

"Why not?" I asked, surprised. "Nearly every man is!"

"Yes, but I couldn't possibly be--er--attracted to Muriel Elvey!" he declared, vigorously shaking that small golden head of his. "Oh, no. Not to her! I know too much!"

"You hardly know her at all. You've only met twice."

"I know a great deal about her," declared young Colonel Fielding, impressively. "Not about this girl personally, perhaps. But about her kind."

He got up off the sack with an air of "that finishes it."

Deeply interested, since this was Dick Holiday's pal speaking of Dick Holiday's lady-love, I asked: "What do you mean by 'her kind'?"

"I'll tell you some day," the young man promised me, getting into his Burberry again. "I could tell you--er--yards! And I will. Only I am afraid there isn't time just now. I promised to meet old Dick at the bridge at eleven, by Jove. I must tear myself away. Good-bye. I say, I am glad we had this--er--little talk."

"Little talk" was good! His tongue had been going at least as fast as the shearing-wheel, or as the clipping-knife in Ivor's hand.

As he nodded to the shepherd and saluted me, I said, in a tone more cheerily friendly than I'd ever thought I should use to him, "Wait, wait; do stop a minute! This is all very well, Colonel Fielding, but when are you going to have that other little talk?"

"Which other?" he asked, standing, a graceful black silhouette, in the opening of the shearing-shed.

"Oh, you know! What a young Pretender you are, always!" I cried, half laughing. "I mean when are you going to speak about this, to her?"

He looked down, tilting his head sideways in a characteristic pose he had, lashes down, a gleam of small white teeth showing between the parted lips under the Avenue-gold smudge that he called a moustache. Oh, he was much too like a coloured advertisement for Burberry's! Still, it was Elizabeth's choice. I was thankful that she was going to be happy with it. Only, when?

He said, laughing, "What a staunch little friend you are to her! You even go as far as to--er--ask people their 'intentions' about her.... Miss Matthews, you'll be the first person we shall tell!"

Now what did he mean?

In spite of his caring, genuinely, was he going to keep his love guessing a little longer?

"Do you think," he said teasingly to me, "that I ought to go off and bother her with this--er--on the nail? In the middle of whatever job she's on? I don't knew where she is?"

He was answered--as he deserved.

Not by me!

It was that "reserved man," Ivor the shepherd, reputed to speak only his own language, who suddenly took us both aback.

Lifting his head from his shearing, the Welshman put in, in his pleasant up-and-down accent, "You looking for that other lady, sir? Miss Weare? I do think it is in the kitchen!"

Here was a bit of a shock.

The young Colonel and I had been chatting so freely, so confidentially! Imagining ourselves quite uncomprehended, we had literally forgotten the presence of the silent, blue-jacketed Welsh shepherd, who knelt there busily shearing, while one of us turned the wheel and both of us talked.... How we had talked, to be sure!

And Ivor had not only heard; he had followed the conversation!

This was what he sprung upon us now! Consternation! The blankest of awkward pauses!

Then Colonel Fielding, biting that golden morsel of a moustache, cleared his throat, turned to the shepherd, and said coldly and with as much dignity as could be lent to an obviously foolish remark, "I thought you didn't know any English?"

Ivor blinked mildly back at the officer and answered: "'Deed, I not know only very little, sir."

"I expect you all know a great deal more than you--er--give out, you Welsh!" declared Colonel Fielding, half-exasperated, half-amused. "That's how you get on in the world, isn't it?"

"Sir?" said Ivor, with a pleasant, puzzled smile.

Impossible to tell whether he understood or not! We should never know, either, how much of the talk we'd had had been eagerly taken in by him! All of it? We couldn't exactly ask him! Colonel Fielding glanced at me with a half-humorous little shrug. The same thought struck us both at the same minute.

One thing was pretty certain. Very shortly Ivor would retail to Mrs. Ivor in fluent Welsh everything that he had understood of our English. In that gossipy little nest which was Careg, gaping for any crumb of news, it would very soon be all over the place that Colonel Fielding was to marry "that little young lady that's working for Mr. Price"! Yes; by midday it would be proclaimed. It would run like wildfire up to the Hospital and down to the Land Girls' Camp. Everybody would know! Before Elizabeth herself knew!

I could not help laughing at the dismayed face of young Colonel Fielding as he stood there, frowning, the wind taken out of his sails. It did serve him right! Mischievous as he was, and full of guile and wile and teasing, sheltering himself behind that pretence of shyness, he found his match in this Welshman who put up that bluff of ignorance! The game was to Ivor the shepherd, who did understand English after all....

But Colonel Fielding trumped that. He turned to me and remarked: "I am going to find her now, at once."

And he said it in rapid French!

With which he left me to my soothing mechanical work in the shearing-shed.

I watched his figure (waisted as if he wore corsets always, though to do him justice he never did except for his masquerades) disappear across the farmyard to the red-brick house.