THE FORTUNES OF WAR
War—European war was at our very doors, and it seemed more than likely that England was going to join in, Mr. Jessop said.
He went on, quite quietly, to inform us that it would find him ready, he guessed. He'd sent in his application early to the Royal Flying Corps, and he guessed that next time we saw him he'd be an Army aviator all right, in training for using his own bomb-dropper——
Here his young cousin dropped her soup-spoon with a clatter.
"What?" cried Miss Million sharply. "You? If there is any war, shall you start fighting the Germans?"
"I should say so!" smiled Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. "Why, yes!"
"But you're American! Why ever on earth should you fight?" demanded Miss Million rather shrilly. "Nothing to do with you! You aren't English; you aren't Belgium! You belong to a—what's it?—a neutral nation!"
"I guess I'm not going to let that stand in my way any," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, "if there's a chance of getting in at those hounds!"
And I saw a curious change come over my mistress's small, bonny face as she regarded this man who—under no obligation to fight—felt he could not merely look on at a struggle between Right and Might.
It was not the sentimental, girlish adoration that she had turned upon her first fancy, the Honourable Jim.
It was the look of a real woman upon the man who pleases her.
This was not the only quick change which the war made.
For instance, who would have thought that those German Jews, the Rattenheimers, would ever have had to be interned in a camp in the middle of England, away from all their friends and all their jewel-collecting pursuits?
And who would have thought that Mr. Hiram P. Jessop—I beg his pardon! I mean Flight-Lieutenant H. P. Jessop, of the Royal Flying Corps, was responsible for the prompt and uncompromising manner in which that alien couple were "dropped upon" by the authorities. Well! I should like to hope that their imprisonment was at least half as uncomfortable as that night which my mistress and I passed—thanks to them—at Vine Street police-station! But no, I suppose that's too much to expect.
Then there's the change that has been brought about by the war in my young mistress herself.
At a time when all uniform is glorious, she herself has gone back to uniform, to her old, cast-aside livery of the print frock, the small white cap, the apron of domestic service!
I gasped when I first heard what she intended to take up, namely, the position of "ward-maid" in a big London house that has been turned into a hospital for wounded officers.
"I must do something for them," she told me. "I feel I must!"
"Well, but why this particular thing?" I demurred. "If you wanted to you could take up nursing——"
"Nursin', nothing!" she retorted, in an idiom which she had borrowed from the Flight-Lieutenant. "To begin with, I've no gift that way. I know I haven't; a girl can feel that in her bones. Secondly, I ain't no training for it. I'm not one of these that imagine because it goes to their heart to see a pore fellow with a bandage round his head, well, they're a born nurse!"
"With your money," I told her, "you could provide that hospital with any number of indoor maids to do the work!"
"Yes. And how'd they do it? Not as I should," maintained the Soldier's-Orphanage-trained girl very proudly. "I know the ways o' some o' these townified maids; haven't I watched 'em all down Laburnum Grove? I'm going to make my 'bit' another way!"
From morn until dewy eve the girl who was once Miss Million, the heiress, works harder than ever she worked when she was my Aunt Anastasia's maid-of-all-work. Thursday is her afternoon off; Thursday sees her motoring in the Park, exquisitely got up in a frock and furs that were bought during the "shopping orgy" of the first week of her wealth. And——
She has thought it over once again, and she has promised to marry her aviator on his very first leave.
"Seemed to make all the difference, him being a soldier; seems to make anybody just twice the man they was before. And him just three times, seeing he'd no real call to go and fight, only he wanted to!" she admitted to me, when we were all packing up to come away from the house in Wales, where we had left the ventriloquist's wife in charge.
So that, if all's well, I shall yet have the task of attiring Miss Nellie Million in her shimmering bridal-gown and her filmy veil for that wedding of hers on which I had set my heart from the beginning.
Only—her bridesmaids will have to be Marmora, the Breathing Statue Girl, and the lively little Boy-Impersonator.
Vi Vassity and I will be debarred from that function, because we're both married women.
Yes! I am married, too!
But not to Mr. Reginald Brace.
For when he persisted, "Why are you so sure you could never care?"
I said frankly, "I hate to hurt you. But—Reginald, I don't like the way your hair grows."
He looked at me in utter bewilderment through the darkness-made-visible of those Welsh lamps.
He said: "But a man can't help the way his hair grows!"
"No. And a woman can't help the way she feels about it," I told him sadly but resolutely.
He saw at last that I meant I wasn't going to take him. He went—after saying all those things about remembering me as the sweetest girl he'd ever met, and if ever I wanted a friend, et cetera—all the pathetic, well-meant, useless things that I suppose a rejected man finds some comfort in.
He went back to a whirl of business at his bank, and he has stayed there ever since, "carrying on" his usual everyday job (the only sort of "carrying on" he knows, as Vi Vassity would say). In his way he is "on active service" too; doing his duty by his country. There is something the matter with his heart—besides his crossed-in-love affair, I mean—something that prevents him from enlisting. Very hard lines on him, to be quite young and otherwise fit, but doomed to remain a civilian. Of course there have to be some people as civilians still. We couldn't get on without any civilians at all, could we?
My lover joined as a trooper the day before war was officially declared.
And he came over to Miss Million's house in Wales to tell us of his plans the morning after Mr. Brace had gone off to town. He—the other man—was still in the laurel-green chauffeur's kit that he was so soon going to change for his Majesty's drab-coloured but glorious livery. And I was in my maid's black, with cap and apron, when I opened the door to him.
"Where's your mistress? In the drawing-room? Then come into the library, child," said the Honourable Jim Burke, "for it's you I've come to call upon."
"I've only a minute to spare you," I said forbiddingly, as I showed him into the square, rather mouldy-smelling library, with its wall of unread books and its family-portraits of dead and gone Price-Vaughans. "And besides, I don't think a chauffeur ought to come to the front door and——"
"I shall not be a chauffeur a minute longer than it takes me to get out of this dashed kit," said the Honourable Jim. Then he told me about his enlisting for active service.
"It won't be much time I shall have before that regiment gets its orders," he said. "Time enough, though——"
He paused and looked hard at me. So hard that I felt myself colouring, and turned away.
He took a step after me. I felt him give a little pull at my apron-strings to make me look round.
"Time enough to get married, darling of my heart," said Jim Burke, laughing softly.
And he took me into his arms and kissed me; at first very gently, then eagerly, fiercely, as if to make up for time already lost and for all that time yet to come when we must be apart from each other.
This, if you please, was all the proposal that ever I had from the young man.
I know all his faults.
Unscrupulous; he doesn't care how many duller and stodgier people he uses to his own advantage. Insincere; except to his wife. To me he shows his heart!
Vain—well, with his attractions, hasn't he cause for it? Unstable as water, he shall not excel; except in the moment of stress and the tight corner where a hundred more trusted men might fail, as they did the day he won the Military Cross, when he took that German trench single-handed, and was found with the enemy, aghast, surrendering in heaps around him!
His dare-devil gaiety and recklessness are given value now by the conditions of this war. And I feel that he will come back to me unscratched at the end of the struggle, his career assured. It will be luck, his unfailing luck as usual—no merit of his!
Meanwhile I wait hopefully.
I feed my heart's hunger, as do so many other women, on pencilled scraps of letters scrawled across the envelope "on active service."
As for my living, I haven't gone back to Aunt Anastasia, nor have I yet solved the weighty problem of how a woman of my class and requirements is to live on the separation allowance. Now that Miss Million has gone back to her old work Mrs. James Burke has taken another job; well paid, and to a kindly mistress.
Miss Vi Vassity's "dresser" gave notice because she had been offered higher wages by a French dancer. And London's Love, who, she says, hates "to see any strange face putting the liquid white on her shoulders," offered the post to "little Smithie."
I accepted.
I live the queer, garish, artificially lighted life of the theatres now. I dress the hair and change the Paris frocks, and lace the corsets, and mend the pink silk fleshings of England's Premier Comedienne.
I am in her dressing-room now, busily folding and putting away her scattered, scented garments. Even from here I can catch the roar of applause that goes up from every part of the theatre as she comes on in that dainty, impertinent travesty of a Highlander's uniform to sing her latest recruiting song, "The London Skittish."
To the right of her making-up mirror there stands a massively framed, full-length photograph of a slim lad's figure in black tights. It's the picture of that worthless trick cyclist, who was the love of Vi Vassity's life.
Ah, Vi! Do you think he is the only man whose cropped dark hair has felt like velvet beneath a woman's lips? The only man whose laugh has pierced a woman's heart "straight as a pebble drops into a pool"?
The woman knows better. I know some one who——
Suddenly I saw his dark head, his laughing face in the mirror before me.
Jim!
I thought I must be dreaming.
I turned; I met his black-lashed blue gaze.
His broad-shouldered, khaki-clad form filled up the narrow doorway of Vi Vassity's dressing-room.
"Child," he called in the inexpressibly soft Irish voice.
He held out his arms.
It was he—my husband.
I ran to him....
"Gently," he said, wincing ever so little. "Mind my shoulder, now. It's smashed—more or less completely."
I cried out, seeing now that the jacket hung like a dolman upon his shoulder. I faltered the thought that would come to any woman. Yes! However brave she was, however glad to let her man go out to do "his bit," there is a limit to what she is willing to lose ... and there are still young and strong and able-bodied civilians in England, untouched even by a Zeppelin bomb!
I said: "You can't—you can't be sent out again?"
"Bad cess to it, no," frowned my husband. "Don't look so relieved now, or I'll have to feel ashamed of you, Lady Ballyneck——"
"What d'you call me?" I asked, not comprehending. It was some minutes before I did understand what he said about his dad and his brother Terence, both "outed" the same day at Neuve Chapelle.
"And ourselves saddled with the God-forsaken castle and the estate, save the mark," said my husband, Lord Ballyneck, ruefully. "What we'll do with it until we let it to Miss Million at a princely rental (as I mean to) the dear only knows! It's a fine match you've made for yourself, child, though, when all's said. A title, at all events. Sure I might have done better for myself," he concluded, with his blue eyes, alive with mirth and tenderness, feasting on my face. "I might have done better for myself than Miss Million's maid!"