Up in his room he began a long letter to Nona, pouring out to her all his feelings about this second rejection. He was writing to her—and hearing from her—regularly and frequently now. It was his only vent in the oppression of these frightful days. She said that it was hers, too.
After that letter of hers, at the outbreak of the war, in which she had said that she thanked God for him that he had delayed her decision to unchain their chains and to join their lives, no further reference had been made by either to that near touch of desire's wand. It was, as he had said it should be, as though her letter had never been written. And in her letters she always mentioned Tony. She wrote to Tony every day, she told him; and there were few of her letters but mentioned a parcel of some kind sent to her husband. Tony never wrote. Sometimes, she said, there came a scrap from him relative to some business matter she must see to; but never any response to her daily budget of gossip—"the kind of news I know he likes to hear"—or any news of himself and his doings.
She once or twice said, without any comment, "But he is writing often to Mrs. Stanley and Lady Grace Heddon and Sophie Basildon and I hear bits of him from them and know he is keeping well. Of course, I pretend to them that their news is stale to me." Another time, "I've just finished my budget to Tony," she wrote, "and have sent him two sets of those patent rubber soles for his boots. Do you think he can get them put on? Every day I try to think of some new trifle he'd like; and you'd be shocked, and think I care nothing about the war, at the number of theatres I make time to go to. You see, it makes something bright and amusing to tell him, describing the plays. I feel most frightfully that, although of course my canteen work is useful, the real best thing every woman can do in this frightful time is to do all she can for her man out there; and Tony's mine. When this is all over—oh, Marko, is it ever going to be over?—things will hurt again; but while he's out there the old things are dead and Tony's mine and England's—my man for England: that is my thought; that is my pride; that is my prayer."
And a few lines farther on, "And he's so splendid. Of course you can imagine how utterly splendid he is. Lady King-Warner, his colonel's wife, told me yesterday her husband says he's brave beyond anything she could imagine. He said—she's given me his letter—'the men have picked up from home this story about angels at Mons and are beginning to believe they saw them. Tybar says he hopes the angels were near him, because he thought he was in hell, the particular bit he got into, and he thinks it must be good for angels, enlarging for their minds, to know what hell is like! As a matter of fact, Tybar himself is nearer to the superhuman than anything I saw knocking about at Mons. His daring and his coolness and his example are a byword in a battalion composed, my dear, with the solitary exception of the writer, entirely of heroes. In sticky places Tybar is the most wonderful thing that ever happened. I like to be near him because his immediate vicinity is unquestionably a charmed circle; and I shudder to be near him because his is always the worst spot.'
"Can't you imagine him, Marko?"
II
And always her letters breathed to Sabre his own passionate love of England, his own poignant sense of possession in her and by her, his own intolerable aching at the heart at his envisagement of her enormously beset. They reflected his own frightful oppression and they assuaged it, as his letters, she told him, assuaged hers, as burdens are assuaged by mingling of distress. "There is no good news," he told her, "and for me who can do nothing—and sometimes things are a little difficult with me here and I suppose that makes it worse—there seems to be no way out. But your letters are more than good news and more than rescue; they are courage. Courage is like love, Nona: it touches the spirit; and the spirit, amazing essence, is like a spring: it is never touched but it—springs!"
She was working daily at a canteen at Victoria station. She had been on the night shift "but I can't sleep, I simply cannot sleep nowadays"; and so, shortly before he wrote to her of his second rejection, she had changed on to the day shift and at night took out the car to run arriving men from one terminus to another. "And about twice a week I get dog-tired and feel sleepy and send the chauffeur with the car and stay at home and do sleep. It's splendid!"
Northrepps had been handed over to the Red Cross as a military hospital. Her answer to his letter telling of his second rejection at the recruiting office—most tender words from her heart to his heart, comforting his spirit as transfusion of blood from health to sickness maintains the exhausted body—her reply told him that on that day fortnight she was coming down to say of his disappointment what she could so inadequately express in writing. She was going out to war work in France—in Tony's name she had presented a fleet of ambulance cars to a Red Cross unit and she was going out to drive one—and she was coming down to look at things at Northrepps before she left.