The idea was new to William, and a year or two ago he would have repelled it because it was new; now he turned his eyes from the horizon, curiously, to the lean brown face at his elbow.
“No?” he said interrogatively.
“If,” said the other, “if I had gone back … it wouldn’t have been the same. It couldn’t have been. … If you live that way there’s two things you can’t do without: a good strong body to stand rain and wind and work, and a mind you’re not afraid to be alone with. When you’re miles from anyone, in the woods at night, you want to be good company for yourself. If I’d turned my back on it all, I mightn’t have been very good company. I’ve done plenty of things to set the parsons praying over me if I told ’em; I’ve been a fool times out of mind and ashamed of it afterwards; but—”
He slid into a silence that lasted until William took up the word; not in answer or argument but irrelevantly, so that he, too, might talk out his heart.
“Do you know what I think I am sometimes? a rat in a trap—or a squirrel spinning round in a cage. Very busy doing nothing. … I’ll tell you one of the things I’ve been doing lately—every word of it truth. I’ve been typing a long correspondence about a civilian—a worker in one of the religious organizations who came into the town, ten miles by train, to get stores he wanted for his hut. The rule is, civilians mustn’t travel by train without a movement order from the A.P.M.; there isn’t an A.P.M. in the place he comes from, so he went to the military and got an ordre de service. He came all right, but it’s irregular—an ordre de service should only be given to a soldier. One of the M.P.’s on duty at the station reported it—and there’s been strafing and strafing and strafing. Reams written about it—I’ve written ’em. Not only about the ordre de service but about who the correspondence is to go through—the A.P.M.’s office or the Base Commandant or someone else. After three or four weeks it was referred to G.H.Q. and someone there wrote to the secretary of the organization asking for an explanation—and naturally he answered the letter. Well, that was irregular too; he oughtn’t to have answered because the matter should have been dealt with locally—‘gone through the proper channels.’ So more correspondence and strafing. … Sheets of paper—reams of it—and they say it’s scarce! And in the end, nothing—just nothing. When the wretched people wrote and asked exactly what they were to do—how they were to get a movement order from an A.P.M. when there wasn’t an A.P.M. to give it, we wrote back and said, ‘This correspondence must now cease.’ I ticked it out on my typewriter.”
“I believe you,” the other nodded, “I’ve seen something of that sort myself. … And the papers say, ‘Your country wants you’!”
“And it goes on,” said William, “day after day. I’m always busy—about nothing. ‘Attention is directed to G.R.O. 9999. The Return called for in the form shown as the third appendix—’ ”
“Good Lord,” cried the other, “stop it. That’s just what maddens me—I don’t want to think of it.”
William laughed sullenly with his chin resting on his hand.
“I’ve not much else to think of,” he said.
He watched the lean man down the hill till a winding of the road hid him; and then he too rose, in his turn, and went back to the town—to the rattrap wherein he made war!
XVIII
The war was well past its third anniversary when William again met Edith Haynes. The silence once broken between them they had corresponded with a fair regularity, and, leave being due to him, he wrote to ask if he should be likely to meet her in London; receiving in answer a hearty invitation to pass as much of his leave as he could spare—the whole of it if he would—with her mother and herself in Somerset. The reply was an eager acceptance; hitherto his leave, if a respite from the office, had been dreary enough in comparison with the homecomings of other men—it was a suspicion of the loneliness in which it was usually passed that had prompted Edith’s invitation. She met him at the station and drove him home, and they picked up their odd friendship at the point where they had left it off.
The only other member of the family with whom he made acquaintance was a delicate, pale mother, given, since her firstborn was killed at Thiepval, to long silences and lonely brooding; a younger son had been a prisoner since the surrender at Kut, and Edith ran her mother as well as the house and the estate. She looked older, and by more than the passing of three years; the iron of war had entered into her soul, for the brother killed in France had been her darling as well as her mother’s; but in other ways she was just what William remembered her, a kindly and capable good comrade. The delicate, pale mother kept much to her room, and the pair, in consequence, were left often to each other’s company—sometimes tramping the home farm with Edith bent on bailiff’s duties, sometimes sitting by the evening fire. For the first day or two he was not communicative—engrossed, perhaps, in mere pleasure in his new surroundings; but even through the stiffness and restraint of his letters she had guessed at something of the change that had come over him, and when he showed signs of emerging from his shell she took pains, on her side, to draw him out and discover his attitude of mind. By degrees, from his silences as much as from his speech, she learned of the weariness that had settled like a mist on his soul, the
