HAT you need is a complete change, and quiet,” said his cousin Dorothy.
Guy, indeed, in spite of his efforts to keep up appearances, was a dismal figure. He had been passing the teacups and the bread and butter, enduring all the jests about sugar-rations and margarine, and enduring, which was so much worse, the complacencies over the approaching end of the war. His haggard face, narrow-jawed and high-foreheaded, expressed this endurance rather than any social amenity, and he was aware that Aunt Emily could hardly feel that the presence of her poet and soldier nephew added much to her tea-party. Indeed, the chattering, cheerful women affected his nerves almost as painfully as did the sound of the motor-buses when—every day it happened—he stopped on the curb, after leaving his office in Whitehall, and wondered how long it would take him to summon courage to cross the street. He felt, then, like breaking down and crying; and he felt like it now when they said, “Isn’t it all too splendid!”
Cousin Dorothy was as chattering and as cheerful as the rest of them, and she had every reason to be, he remembered, with Tom, her fiancé, ensconced in Paris, safe after all his perils. Dorothy, though like everybody else she had worked hard during the war, had seen nothing and lost nothing. And she had never had any imagination. All the same, he was thankful when she rescued him from the woman who would talk to him idiotically about his poetry (she evidently hadn’t understood a word of it), and took him into a quiet nook near the piano.
It might, then, have been mere consanguinity, for he had never before found intimacy possible where Dorothy was concerned; or it might have been a symptom of his state (his being at Aunt Emily’s tea-party at all was that!); but, at all events after admitting that Mrs. Dickson had been boring him, he found himself presently confessing his terrors about the motor-buses, his terror of the dark, his sleeplessness and general disintegration. His nervous laugh was a concession to Dorothy’s possible misunderstanding; but as he went on, he felt himself almost loving her for the matter-of-factness she infused into her sympathy. After all, even good old Dorothy wasn’t stupid enough to suspect him of cowardice; and although, from a military point of view, he had made such a mess of it (invalided home again and again on account of digestive complaints, and finally, last spring, transferred to his small official post in London), to any one, really, who had at all followed his career, it would be apparent that no one could have stuck harder to the loathly job. He had felt it that, and only that, even while, prompted by pride, he had made his effort to enlist, in the first months of the war. It had been with a deep relief that he had found himself at once rejected and free to stay behind, free to serve humanity with his gift rather than with his inefficiency; for he took his poetic vocation with a youthful seriousness. And when, later on, through one of the blunders of medical examinations, he was drawn into the net of conscription, no one could have denied that he marched off to the shambles with unflinching readiness.
Dorothy, he saw, took courage all along for granted: “It’s simply a case of shell-shock,” she said, as if it were her daily fare; “you’re queer and jumpy, and you can’t stand noise. It’s quite like Tommy.”
He couldn’t associate Tommy, short-nosed, round-headed, red-eared Tommy, with anything of the sort, and said so in some resentment. But Dorothy assured him that for some months—just a year ago—Tommy had been at home on sick leave, and really bad enough for anything. “He suffered in every way just as you do.”
Guy was quite sure he hadn’t, but he did not want to argue about it. For nothing in the world would he have defined to Dorothy what he really suffered.
“It’s country air you need; country food and country quiet,” Dorothy went on. “You can get away?”
“Oh, yes; I can get away all right. Old Forsyth is most decent about it. He was telling me this morning that I ought to take a month.”
“I wonder if Mrs. Baldwin could have you at Thatches,” Dorothy mused. “Tommy got well directly.”