CHAPTER VII

AFTER-EFFECTS

_Rosalind_: "Oh, Jupiter, how weary are my spirits!" _Celia_: "I care not for my spirits, if my legs were not so weary." --SHAKESPEARE.

Severely I looked at my chum.

She and I were walking down the road between the flowering hedges back to camp behind Vic, Sybil, and Curley.

Now the other two pupils--who had wound up their day's work by milking, which we had been sent to watch--had knocked off obviously as fresh as paint. Elizabeth, too, made no complaint of feeling tired after her day's stone-picking. She strode along manfully, and I thought that the rather wooden way she moved was just because of the clumsy land-boots.

So that I vowed to myself that I'd never let her know what I'd begun to feel, after the midday rest, and in every muscle, namely, the relentless strain of unusual physical exertion.

Ah! How it had got me!

The first game of tennis, the first bicycle ride, the first row, the first long tramp of a summer holiday--everybody knows the ache that comes after these. Multiply that ache by fifty, and you'll have some idea of what happens after the first day's land-work. Personally I felt it would be all I could do to drag my stiffening limbs back to the hut!

I also felt that for Elizabeth to cross-question me at this moment was adding insult to aches. After staring at dinner, too!

"Elizabeth, you are a little owl," I informed her. "I know what you imagine. Can't any sort of young man say a word to me without it's starting some idea of a love-affair?"

Elizabeth, set-faced, said coolly, "Apparently not."

I straightened my back indignantly. Then caught my breath because it hurt me so. Hoping she hadn't noticed this, I demanded, "What d'you mean by that?"

"Wherever you go, Joan, young men always seem to break out," Elizabeth replied rebukefully.

She spoke the words "young men" just as Farmer Price might have mentioned caterpillars in his standing crops.

"You forget that I came down here just because I'd had enough of them!" I said wearily.

Elizabeth, scowling:

"We've only just finished with the eternal Harry. For a year he monopolized you; nobody else existed! Then he went, leaving you without an ounce of go or fun in you--anyhow, he did go; at last. But the very day he'd gone you got a proposal from that other Man-thing; what was his name?"

"D'you mean Richard Wynn?"

"Yes. There was that. Well, you lost his letter. So he was off----"

"Shouldn't have taken him, anyhow," I protested.

"You said you would."

"People will say anything," I defended myself, "after a day like I'd just had in that office."

"I sometimes think you'd be quite silly enough to accept him yet," declared my candid friend as we tramped past the park trees that gave a glimpse of the white hospital. "But then we come down here. And the very first evening--what happens? A third young man crops up!"

"He didn't crop up to see me."

"Curious that you should be the only girl in the camp that he picked out to speak to," sniffed Elizabeth. "And that the next morning he should make a bee line for that cow-house of yours, and----"

Here she broke off with an alarmingly sudden little screech of "Ow!"

I stopped.

"What is the matter!"

"Nothing," retorted Elizabeth, with tears in her eyes.

"My dear old girl, what is it?" I insisted anxiously.

Then she laughed. She blurted out quickly:

"It's only that--the more I move the more it hurts me! Oh, Joan, I'm sore! That's why I snapped at you so crossly. They say 'Cross as a bear with a sore paw'--but--but I'm sore everywhere!"

"Oh! So am I!" I groaned, laughing with the relief of the confession. "I feel as if I'd got fifty new bones."

"So do I!"

"All hurting me like mad!"

"So are mine!" declared Elizabeth, hobbling. "Well, I suppose we'll get used to it. They say this wears off. Let's hope for the best--and for goodness' sake don't let us squabble."

"I never want to!"

"Righto. And tell me," continued my chum, "what you really do think of that young man Captain Holiday?"

I couldn't help laughing. If Elizabeth wants to get at anything, it comes off in the long run. So, as we hobbled stiffly down the road together, I told her as much as I did "think" on the score of this new acquaintance. I described the cow-house scene.

"Such a truly idyllic setting," I chaffed her, "for any sort of a _tête-à-tête_!"

I repeated the young man's remarks about the way to "make work do itself, and to let gravity grav." I told her how he'd made me roll down my sleeves again, and had ordered me about generally.

"I think he's rather a domineerer. But he is a sahib, of course. He's rather original, too. And almost the rudest person I've met," I said critically. "He is the rudest, next to you."

Elizabeth said blandly:

"Yes, and yet you've always liked me most awfully. I suppose you'll soon find out how much you like him."

I began to say, "We shall probably never see the man again," but remembered that he was the owner of this land on which we toiled, and that it would sound silly. So I merely said:

"I don't dislike him at all."

Elizabeth shook her bobbed hair against her cheeks. Grimly, fatalistically, she added:

"I know you're going to like him horribly."

"I know your poor little sore bones have affected your brain!" I told her. "Haven't I just had one 'doing' over liking some one too horribly? Yet, in the middle of that, you say----"

"It isn't the middle," Elizabeth returned very quickly, "it is coming to the end."

"What!"

"It is the beginning of the end. You won't go on thinking of Harry to the end of your days."

"Much you know about it, child!" I said, and as I spoke the wide sun-lighted green lands faded from before me, and I saw Harry's polished black head above the pink lights of a restaurant table--Harry's handsome, straying eyes. "The thought never leaves me, Elizabeth."

"Hasn't it left you once today?"

Here--well, it was the greatest surprise to me, but I did have to straighten my mouth out of a smile. Today? The thought of Harry had certainly been somewhat overlaid by--cow-house. But I said:

"It's there always, worse luck, at the back of my mind."

"Making more room in front," said my impish chum. "You're better about him already."

Patiently I sighed.

"You're better," insisted Elizabeth, "even this little time away in this weird place with this extraordinary job lot of people has done you good. You will begin to forget soon."

Pityingly I smiled at her.

"Harry," I told her, "is not the kind of man who gets forgotten. I wish he were. He is one of those charmers who leave their mark on a woman's life. He'd such wonderful ways. He----"

"Don't shove me into the wall," begged Elizabeth. "I feel knocked about enough as it is."

"Sorry. I wish I could make you realize, though, about Harry. He once took me to a play where the woman says: 'There are two kinds of love affairs. There are affairs--and there are just loves.' Unfortunately this is one of those."

"Oh, yes," said Elizabeth drily.

"If you'd ever had one of either," said I, nettled, "you'd know the difference."

"So that there will always be one thing that I shall never know," concluded the Man-hater, limping along.

I glanced at the small dog-tired but resolute figure in the smock that the evening sunlight was gilding from holland to cloth of gold.

"Wait!" I threatened her again. "Wait until some great huge ultra-masculine man comes along and begins to bully you in a voice like a typhoon!"

"Like a what?"

"Like a gale! Like a Bull of Basan! That sort of huge brute who'd terrify the life out of you, Elizabeth my child, and order you about like Petruchio and Katherine in _The Taming of the Shrew_! That's what'll happen! I shall simply love to watch you being absolutely subjugated"--

"Book early, to avoid disappointment," mocked my chum.

"--subjugated by a gigantic, navvy sort of person with muscles as big as vegetable-marrows bobbling all over his arms and shoulders!"

"It sounds too fascinating, doesn't it?" jeered the girl whose head reached up to my ear. "I love your prognostications, Joan, especially after a hard day's work! It puts you in train! You really think a bully-ragging Prize-fighter-type will be my Fate!"

"Unless----" Here I had another idea. "Unless you ever meet the one and only man in this world that you've ever written letters to. What about that old Colonel of yours?" I laughed.

A word of explanation here.

"The Old Colonel" had been for a year a standing joke in our London _ménage_. He was the officer whose furnished flat we had taken over by the week in Golder's Green--and which we'd now left for such very different quarters. His flat was full of neat contrivances, such as the bath-mat, hand-made out of rounds of bottle corks; full, too, of books on "Tactics," all annotated in a neat, old-maidish hand.

We had amused ourselves by making a mental picture of their owner--a methodical, fussy, white-moustached "old" soldier. This had seemed all of a piece, too, with the Colonel's letters; for he and Elizabeth had exchanged much formal correspondence on the subjects of the kitchen chimney and of the tabby-cat he pensioned.

"When he comes back from the Front and sees you," I threatened her, "it may alter everything. If you become an old man's darling----"

"Brrrr!" shuddered Elizabeth.

"Plenty of girls do. You might like it better than marrying the Lion-Tamer, after all.... And don't say I didn't warn you if it does come off----"

"Give me your handkerchief," said Elizabeth, without ceremony plucking the green silk handkerchief out of my smock pocket. "I want to tie a knot in it."

She tossed it back to me as we went on.

"What's that for?" I demanded. "To remind you of what I said about that old Colonel of yours?"

"No," from Elizabeth. "It's to remind you of something, Joan."

As the corrugated iron roof of the hut came into sight beyond the great white cliff of a hawthorn bush she spoke earnestly, but with an imp of mischief dancing in each of her eyes.

"Whatever happens, however much better you may feel, however much more you may laugh and talk like your old self, I want you always to remember one thing. I want you to be sure--sure to go on thinking of Harry at least once every day!"

And before I could take the unsympathetic little wretch by her overalled shoulders and shake her, before I could pull her short hair, or even retort by a single word, we were back at the camp among the girls--with a fresh trial awaiting us!