“Mrs. Baldwin?” His voice, he knew, expressed an unflattering scepticism, but he couldn’t help it. “Is she at home—an institution?” He saw Mrs. Baldwin, hatefully tactful, in a Red Cross uniform. “No, thank you, my dear.”
“Of course not. What do you take me for?” Dorothy kept her competent eyes upon him. “It’s not even a P.G. place—at all events, not a regular one, though of course you do pay for your keep. She has very narrow means and takes friends sometimes, and, since the war, it’s just happened—by people telling each other, as I’m telling you—to be shell-shock cases rather particularly. It’s a lovely country, and a dear, quaint little cottage, and she does you most awfully well, Tommy said.”
“I don’t like the idea of settling down like that on a stranger.”
"But she wouldn’t be a stranger. You’d go through me, and I feel as if I knew her already through Tommy. He said he was at home at once. ‘Cosy,’
was how he expressed it. And you get honey on your bread at tea and
cream in your coffee at breakfast, and all sorts of delightful things en casserole, that she cooks with her own hands, quite equal, Tommy said, to the French. And, Tommy knows, now, you see."
“It’s Mrs. Baldwin herself who frightens me. She frightens me more than the motor-buses in Whitehall.” “That’s just what she won’t do. She’s perfectly sweet. Cosy. Middle-aged. A widow. Her nice old father lives with her, and Tommy liked him so much, too. You help her to garden, and with the bees, you know. And the old father plays chess with you in the evenings. There’s a stream near by where you can fish if you want to. It’s late for that, of course; but Tommy got some quite good sport; he was there at just this time of year. And he said that it was most awfully jolly country, and that the meadows all about were full of autumn crocuses.”
“Autumn crocuses? In the fields? I’ve never seen them wild.”
“They do grow wild, though, in some parts of England. They are wild there. Tommy particularly wrote about them. He said one walked down to the stream among the autumn crocuses.”
Dorothy was baiting her hook very prettily, and he gloomily smiled his recognition of it. “They do sound attractive,” he owned. He hadn’t imagined Tom a man to notice crocuses, and he was the more inclined to trust his good impressions further. After all, apart from Mrs. Baldwin and her father, the country, with honey, cream, and autumn crocuses, was a happy combination, if he had been in condition for feeling anything happy.
What would Dorothy have thought of him, could she have known that, while they talked, her rosy, bonnie face kept constantly, before his haunted eyes, dissolving into a skull? Faces had a way of doing this with him since his last encounter with the war in the spring. And all the people talking in the room squeaked and gibbered. How could they go on talking? How could they go on living—after what had happened? How could he? The familiar nausea rose in him even as he forced himself to smile and say, “Well, could she have me—Mrs. Baldwin?”
He could not have made an effort to find a place for himself. Such efforts, he felt sure, would have landed him at some God-forsaken farmhouse miles from the station, where the beds were damp and the meat tough; or, even worse, at a Bournemouth hotel, amid orchestras and people who made a point of dressing for dinner. But, if some one found it for him, he would let himself be pushed off.